
Class RFin^-l 

Book Jls 

Copyright If 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BEYOND THE 
BORDERLINE OF LIFE 

BY 

GUSTAVUS MYERS 



A summing up of the results of the scientific investigation of 

Psychic Phenomena, with an account of Professor Botazzi's 

experiments with Eusapia Paladino, and an abstract 

of the report of the cross-references by Mrs. Piper, 

Mrs. Verrall and others which so influenced 

Sir Oliver Lodge in his decision in 

favor of the spiritistic hypothesis 



w 



BOSTON 
THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. 

1910 



t>*$ 



Copyright, 1910 
By The Ball Publishing Company 



©GI.A271075 



BEYOND THE 
BORDERLINE OF LIFE 



BEYOND THE BORDERLINE 
OF LIFE 

^pHE most significant, far-reaching, 
revolutionary event that has ever 
taken place in scientific circles — an event 
of unparalleled importance to the entire 
human race — is the recent defection, one 
after the other, of at least thirty-five of 
the world's most illustrious scientists, 
from the materialistic school of philos- 
ophy, evidenced by their declarations 
that a variety of attested phenomena 
prove that there are invisible forces 
about us, of which they previously had 
been unaware. 

7 



8 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

While all these men do not agree as to 
absolute conclusions, they are a unit on 
one point, which is that they no longer 
believe, as they had thought and taught 
for years, that physical death ended our 
life. They are also unanimous in assert- 
ing the indisputable fact of the phenom- 
ena known as psychic; although some of 
them have different interpretations from 
others, all of them now concede these 
phenomena to be scientifically estab- 
lished. 

Yet, until very recently all of these sci- 
entists had been bitter skeptics of psychic 
phenomena ; in fact, had vigorously de- 
nied their existence. Every one of them 
was, in his sphere of science, a leading 
exponent of the materialistic dogma that 
our life ended in annihilation and that 
our consciousness was buried in the 
grave. But the whole teachings of a 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 9 

lifetime they have been compelled to re- 
verse, a very extraordinary transforma- 
tion of modern scientific thought, which 
is pregnant with a new message to man- 
kind. 

An equally remarkable fact, which ap- 
parently has thus far escaped attention, 
is that, among all the great scientists, 
only one remains who still adheres to the 
doctrine that our life is a purely mate- 
rial one terminating in destruction by 
bodily death. This lone exception is 
Haeckel, the eminent German savant. 
His associates in the world of science, 
and even his collaborators, have aban- 
doned his ideas and theories, which they 
now regard as obsolete and as shattered 
by the proofs investigated by them. 

There is no greater psychologist in the 
world than Enrico Morselli, for twenty- 
seven years professor of psychology in 



10 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

the University of Genoa. He shares 
with Professor William James, of Har- 
vard, the distinction of being one of the 
very few of the world's consummate mas- 
ters of that department of science. Nor 
are there any names more authoritative in 
the various quarters of science than those 
of Filippo Botazzi, director of the 
Physiological Institute at the University 
of Naples and one of the foremost of 
European biologists ; Professor Schia- 
parelli, the famous astronomer who dis- 
covered the canals on Mars; Pio Foa, 
professor of pathological anatomy at the 
University of Turin, a scientist who has 
a unique popularity and influence; Pro- 
fessor Mosso, whose works on fatigue 
and other physiological subjects are uni- 
versally regarded as classics; Camille 
Flammarion, director of the astronom- 
ical observatory, Juvisy, France, who has 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 11 

done so much to popularize astronomy; 
Charles Richet, professor of physiology, 
in the University of Paris; Pierre Janet, 
another French scientific luminary; 
Lombroso, whose brilliant volumes on 
criminology have caused great discus- 
sion; and the distinguished German sa- 
vant, now of the Institut General Psy- 
chologique of Paris, Julien Ochorowicz. 

All of these scientists, after an entire 
career of indifference, severe doubt, or 
intense antagonism to psychic phenom- 
ena, have completely changed front, and 
now fully admit the presence about us of 
invisible forces hitherto unknown, giving 
voluminous reasons for their conversion. 

Many other scientists, after experi- 
ments and investigations, have joined 
them. A few of these are Galeotti, pro- 
fessor of general pathology in the Uni- 
versity of Naples; Luciani, de Amicis, 



12 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Bianchi, Patrizi, Murani, Queirolo, 
Gigli, Vizioli, Scarpa, Pansini, Tambu- 
rini, Tassi, Ascensi, Lombardi, Porro, 
Limoncelli, d'Enrico, Virgilio, Venzano, 
Ottolenghi, and many others too numer- 
ous even to mention, all of them promi- 
nent professors in the various universities 
of Italy, and for the most part, psychia- 
trists and psychologists. The whole 
corps of Morselli's assistants have like- 
wise discarded their former materialist 
beliefs, as also have Mosso's well-known 
aids, Herlitzka 2 Charles Foa, and Agga- 
zoti. 

The continued former hostile position 
of practically all of these men may be 
judged by Morselli's recent pronounce- 
ment of his recognition of psychic phe- 
nomena. "I was myself for many years," 
he writes, "from the commencement of 
my scientific career at the age of seven- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 13 

teen, not only an inveterate and irre- 
claimable 'anti-spiritist,' with regard to 
the hypothesis of survival and interven- 
tion of the defunct, or other occult enti- 
ties, . . . but I was also a bitter 
skeptic with regard to the objective real- 
ity of the phenomena themselves, with 
respect to the existence of new 'forces,' 
different from the physico-chemical ones 
and from the known bio-psychical activ- 
ities. . . . To-day, furnished with 
an experience perhaps sufficient, after 
long and mature reflection on what I 
have seen and touched with my hand, 
after having studied the question of me- 
diumship indefatigably for years, I have 
changed my belief. The result is that I 
can no longer deny the reality and genu- 
ineness of the greater part of these phe- 
nomena, which, at first, I held to be 
purely imaginary." 



14 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Pio Foa likewise publicly stated his 
altered views in a memorable address de- 
livered recently in Turin. The absorb- 
ing interest shown by the general Euro- 
pean public in the revolution of scientific 
thought was demonstrated by the num- 
ber of persons in the audience. "The 
theatre was crowded," says La Stampa, 
"and what a public! Ladies of the aris- 
tocracy and of the upper as well as of 
the middle classes, professors, doctors, 
lawyers, engineers, merchants, workmen, 
and a large number of university stu- 
dents. The Duke of Genoa and the 
Duke of Abruzzi were present in their 
respective boxes. Many people had to 
be turned away. When at nine o'clock 
the lecturer came on the platform, he 
was received by prolonged and deafen- 
ing applause. The public listened in ab- 
solute silence when the lecturer began to 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 15 

speak in his well-known, easy, simple, 
and communicative style, which is one 
of the characteristic features of his ora- 
tory, the secret by means of which Pro- 
fessor Foa always draws such large audi- 
ences, not only from among persons given 
to study of scientific subjects, but also 
from the general public." 

After giving a clear exposition of the 
philosophy of the subject, and the pro- 
longed doubt, mistrust, prejudice, and 
criticism met with, he described in de- 
tail the marvelous phenomena which he 
and many other scientists had seen and 
tested, and included this statement, all 
the more worthy of consideration com- 
ing from so conservative a scientist as he : 
"We can affirm without exaggeration 
that the greatest progress made by con- 
temporary science has been but the au- 
daciously progressive conquest into the 



16 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

region of the ultra-sensible, the ultra- 
visible, and the ultra-ponderable. Be- 
yond what the eye can see, what the ear 
can hear, what the hand can touch, be- 
yond the world of taste and smell and of 
all the other senses, there exists a world 
invisible, inaudible, impalpable, of 
which we know only a few manifesta- 
tions." 

The same radical change of opinion is 
expressed by Botazzi in his "The Unex- 
plored Regions of Human Biology" — a 
work which when issued in book form, 
as it will be shorty will claim a world- 
wide interest. He starts out by saying: 
"I was, I scarcely know whether I 
should say, incredulous or indifferent 
with regard to mediumistic phenomena 
. . . I was more disposed to deny 
the truth of those phenomena than to ac- 
cept them." Proceeding then to narrate 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 17 

the fullest and most specific details of 
these various phenomena as seen and 
tested by him, he concludes: "From 
henceforward, skeptics can only deny the 
facts by accusing us of fraud and charla- 
tanism. I should be very much sur- 
prised if anyone were bold enough to 
bring this accusation against us, but it 
should not disturb our minds in the 
least." 

These foregoing citations instance how 
the leading scientific thought of the time 
has entirely changed. This change car- 
ries with it three very remarkable aspects. 

One is that it must inevitably have the 
profoundest effect upon all conduct, laws, 
religions, institutions, and peoples. If 
there is a life beyond this, a continuation 
of consciousness, a survival of that mys- 
terious thing which we call intelligence, 
spirit, or soul, then the human race, once 



18 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

it realizes the truth of this, will be com- 
pelled by its own moral, ethical, and 
spiritual growth, to make its earthly ex- 
istence conform to the cognition of an 
"hereafter." 

Another is that for the first time in the 
history of man science has arrived at the 
point of asserting that the continuity of 
the soul or intelligence is being demon- 
strated by scientific tests. Hitherto a 
belief in "a life beyond" has been the 
possession of religions only from the 
most primitive tribes to the present civil- 
izations. It has until now, however, ap- 
parently remained merely a belief 
without knowledge, nothing more. No 
scientific proof was adduced that the 
spirit, which guided the body, did not 
die with the body; to all appearances it 
flickered out with the passing of physical 
life. Since no evidence to the contrary 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 19 

was presented, science regarded this re- 
ligious belief as a superstition. 

The third aspect is that the great body 
of foremost scientific men has slowly 
come round to recognizing the truth of 
the fact of the phenomena as brought out 
thirty and forty years ago by those emi- 
nent pioneer investigators of physic phe- 
nomena, Alfred Russell Wallace, Sir 
William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, 
William James, Frederic W. H. Myers, 
Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and 
their many associates in the British So- 
ciety for Psychical Research, which so- 
ciety was organized by them. Professor 
Zollner, the great German physicist, 
dealt with these phenomena thirty years 
since in his monumental work, "Trans- 
cendental Physics." But he, like Wal- 
lace, Crookes, Lodge, and their fellows, 
was ridiculed, sneered at, and denounced. 



20 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Zollner was accused of being insane for 
venturing to declare that he had seen 
various extraordinary psychic phenom- 
ena. The scientific world 1 at that time, 
and until a few years ago, was wholly 
under the influence of the materialist 
teachings. Stoutly denying that any- 
thing of a super-normal character could 
exist, it dismissed the evidence presented 
by these advanced investigators as con- 
trary to human reason. 

Strikingly indicative of how com- 
pletely scientific knowledge has become 
revolutionized by psychical research was 
the reception accorded to Sir Oliver 
Lodge's declaration before the British 
Society for Psychical Research recently 
that exhaustive tests had proved the sur- 
vival of human intelligence in discarnate 
form. "Well known persons," said he, 
"are constantly purporting to communi- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 21 

cate with us with the express purpose of 
patiently proving their known personal- 
ities, and giving evidence of knowledge 
appropriate to them. Not easily or 
early do we make this admission, in spite 
of long conversations with what purports 
to be the surviving intelligence of those 
friends and investigators. We were by 
no means convinced of their identity un- 
til crucial proof, difficult even to imag- 
ine, had according to some of our beliefs 
been supplied." 

Twenty or even five years ago such an 
assertion would have called forth impas- 
sioned taunts and flings from the gener- 
ality of scientists. But only the deepest 
interest and acquiescence were mani- 
fested by his brother scientists on this oc- 
casion. His address was eagerly looked 
forward to, and as engrossingly wel- 
comed, listened to, and read. For thirty- 



22 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

five years Sir William Crookes had been 
made the subject of most virulent de- 
nunciation; he was accused of being 
credulous and lightheaded in his psychic- 
al investigations; and every conceivable 
attempt was made to discredit him. 
When, however, in his celebrated address 
to the British Society for the Advance- 
ment of Science, not long since, he re- 
iterated his conviction that the human 
personality survives, and gave scientific 
reasons which led him to that conclusion, 
not a discordant murmur arose. 

Wallace, Crookes, Lodge, James, and 
their fellow pioneers had passed through 
precisely the same stages that Morselli, 
Janet, Richet, Botazzi, Foa, and the other 
more recent converts have only just un- 
dergone. Wallace, who divided with 
Darwin the distinction of developing the 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 23 

theory of evolution, was an intense and 
avowed materialist, as also were Crookes, 
Lodge, and the others. All were pro- 
nounced skeptics as to the possibility of 
supernormal phenomena; in fact, their 
investigations of the subject arose from 
an aim to expose certain apparently oc- 
cult happenings as fraud and charlatan- 
ism. "Some slight but inexplicable phe- 
nomena," says Wallace, "first attracted 
my attention. I set out to expose them, 
but the facts beat me." 

Years of investigation convinced Wal- 
lace, Crookes, Lodge, Sidgwick, and the 
rest that the phenomena were true. 
Still they were unwilling to believe that 
these seemingly extraordinary occur- 
rences were of supernormal character. 
Only after many more years of patient re- 
search and thought did they conclude 



24 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

that the phenomena were the manifesta- 
tions of disembodied human intelli- 
gences. 

Although pioneers in a modern scien- 
tific sense, Wallace and his associates 
were by no means the discoverers of these 
phenomena. There is the fullest reason 
to believe that the ancients had the wid- 
est knowledge of them. If the evidence 
inherited from the past signifies anything, 
the Egyptian priesthood knew of and 
was intimate with a world invisible to the 
senses. The Bible contains many refer- 
ences which, interpreted by the light of 
present scientific research, indubitably 
confirms the belief that many of the so- 
called miracles were 2 in reality, mani- 
festations of a power or force outside the 
realm of bodily senses. 

Shu King, the oldest Chinese book, 
and the Chandogya Upinishad, one of 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 25 

the earliest works of India, contain ac- 
counts of mediumistic communications. 
Descriptions of automatic writing and 
speaking occur constantly in ancient lore. 
Modern literature, as distinguished from 
the remote historic and classic, is freely 
interspersed with the supernormal — such 
as ghost stories, oracles and mysterious 
voices, witch tales, apparitions, so-called 
second sight, and other unusual happen- 
ings unexplainable by any known force 
or theory. More than a century ago, the 
great German philosopher, Kant, attest- 
ed in his works to some very extraordi- 
nary exhibitions of clairvoyant power by 
Swedenborg, the celebrated Scandinavian 
scientist, philosopher and mystic. 

It may be charged that the present sci- 
entific affirmation is simply a recrudes- 
cence of the study of phenomena long 
since known. A great distinction, how- 



26 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

ever, exists between vague, indetermi- 
nate observation, and scientific investiga- 
tion and collation of facts surrounded by 
the most rigid precautions against possi- 
ble fraud or error. This is a scientific 
age when none but absolutely authenti- 
cated facts are held worthy of consid- 
eration. That science has been able by 
infinite patience to explore into a domain 
far removed from our customary senses is 
its greatest triumph so far. If it has ac- 
complished this much in penetrating in- 
to some of the secrets of nature within 
a few decades, what may we not expect 
from the still finer development of the 
future? 

Strange as it may seem, psychical re- 
search came about in a fortuitous, hap- 
hazard way. Notwithstanding the co- 
pious ancient and medieval records, and 
the traditional and numberless unattested 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 27 

accounts of supernormal occurrences, 
scientists deliberately ignored the sub- 
ject. To them it was not deserving of 
serious thought; they dismissed it as the 
offspring of blind superstition or cre- 
dulity. They saw in it not a series of con- 
crete facts invested with a supreme 
meaning for the human race, but a shad- 
owy, imperceptible, elusive maze of airy 
concoctions, perhaps the result of ex- 
treme religious ecstasy or of demented 
minds. Kant was one of the few men 
who grasped the purport of these singu- 
lar manifestations; for as far back as 
1765 that great mind predicted that the 
time would come when they would be 
scientifically proved. 

Not until 1847 did the modern psy- 
chical movement begin. It really had 
its origin in the manifestations dis- 
played in the presence of two American 



28 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

girls, the Fox sisters, Margaret and 
Katherine, then living in the town of Ar- 
cadia, New York. In that year they 
began to hear strange noises and see 
strange forms. These phenomena, it be- 
came certain, were not produced by hu- 
man causes. The Fox sisters asserted 
that they soon learned by raps to commu- 
nicate with invisible intelligences whom 
they called spirits. The age was a se- 
verely incredulous one; the wave of ma- 
terialism was at its height; and the 
claims of the Fox sisters met with gener- 
al derision. 

A few minds, then young, but since 
become among the world's greatest 
scientists, declined to join in the chor- 
us of ridicule that went up. From 
those meagre beginnings, with but 
scanty foundation of known fact to build 
upon, the whole immense movement, the 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 29 

most important in all times, slowly de- 
veloped. Phenomenon after phenom- 
enon has been uncovered by Wallace, 
Crookes, and their colleagues. Still for 
many years the run of scientists looked 
on and smiled sardonically. Henry 
Sidgwick, one of the great ethical 
writers of the age, declared that the apa- 
thy of scientists and the absence of seri- 
ous organized investigation of these phe- 
nomena, constituted a public scandal and 
a standing reproach to science. In 1882, 
he with a number of associates organized 
the British Society for Psychical Re- 
search, a society which has done momen- 
tous work in unbosoming the secrets of 
the great unknow r n. 

Nothing less than a mass of absolute- 
ly verified facts could have effected this 
tremendous overturning of all former 
scientific theory and thought. For more 



SO Beyond the Borderline of Life 

than half a century, the findings of Wal- 
lace, Crookes, and others have been be- 
fore the whole world's scrutiny; if un- 
sound, unestablished, or fallacious there 
has been the amplest opportunity to ex- 
pose the falsity of the results. But far 
from reaching that conclusion, the scien- 
tific world more and more recognizes the 
truth of those pioneer observations, and 
is continuously adding fresh records to 
the overwhelming evidence already 
brought out. 



CHAPTER II 

NATURE OF PHENOMENA 

WHAT is the nature of the phenom- 
ena, the substantiation of which 
has compelled science to throw away 
much of its old teachings as so much rub- 
bish? They are of various kinds ap- 
parently disassociated, but fundamentally 
all manifestations of the same invisible 
power. They come under two general 
classes — intellectual and physical phe- 
nomena. In turn these two classes em- 
brace seven orders — telepathy, clairvoy- 
ance, materialization, levitation, auto- 
matic or trance writing and talking, 
clairaudience and possession. Again, 

31 



32 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

in turn, each of these groups has a num- 
ber of subdivisions. All of these phe- 
nomena are strictly beyond the range of 
the normal senses and are not subject to 
the operation of any known law. In 
fact, they contravene and overthrow all 
hitherto known so-called cosmic laws. 
They seem to be subject to the laws of 
another cosmos. 

How, then, are they determined? 
What property or power in a human be- 
ing makes them apparent? A certain 
faculty dormant in a large number of 
persons, extremely active in some, which 
is called mediumistic power, constitutes 
the ability to respond as a transmitting 
instrument to the messages of discarnate 
personalities. What underlies this abil- 
ity? One might as well ask what the 
electricity is which causes the telegraph 
or telephone to act. No one knows. If, 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 33 

as maintained by many scientists, the 
soul has an existence of its own entirely 
independent of the body, then some per- 
sons seem to have a psychic power far 
more highly developed than that of 
others. We do not know whether or not 
this psychic capacity has any relation to 
heredity, environment, or any other 
earthly condition, inasmuch as we have 
not yet sufficient data covering that point. 
Mediums are found among all classes and 
kinds of people — the ignorant as well as 
the educated ; the coarse not less than the 
refined ; men as well as women. The 
noted Italian medium, Eusapia Paladino, 
whose mediumistic manifestations have 
had a great share in convincing virtually 
all of the French and Italian scientists, is 
an illiterate peasant. 

To speak of any power as being psychic 
often invites the charge that one is los- 



34 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

ing oneself in mysticism and in the oc- 
cult. But nothing is actually occult. It 
only seems so. As Professor Janet ob- 
serves : "There are no terms more vague 
and undefined than 'occult' and 'mystic.' 
Every phenomenon is occult to those who 
know it imperfectly. Thunder and 
lightning were occult phenomena for 
savages. The study of the properties of 
metals was a mystical affair with the al- 
chemists of the middle ages." Assum- 
ing that many of the great scientists are 
correct in their hypothesis of a spirit life 
beyond the mundane, and that when we 
"die" we become instantly metamor- 
phosed into spirits, we do not know why 
it is that these discarnate beings select 
certain embodied persons as a means of 
transmitting messages or giving other 
manifestations. But that this is the case 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 35 

seems to be abundantly proved beyond a 
doubt. The "whys" and "wherefores" 
remain as yet a mystery. 

Nothing mysterious, however, any 
longer envelopes the phenomena them- 
selves. They are objective and tangible. 
Under certain favorable, but thoroughly 
tested, circumstances, they have been 
seen, touched, heard, or felt, and some of 
them frequently photographed. 

TELEPATHY 

Telepathy and clairvoyance by their 
nature belong to the intellectual class of 
psychic manifestations. It is very diffi- 
cult, however, to draw any sharp line of 
demarcation between the intellectual and 
the physical forms. "The physical phe- 
nomena of mediumship," says Professor 
Caesar de Vesme, "are never exclusively 



36 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

physical; they are blended with intelli- 
gence." 

Telepathy is no longer considered a 
conjectural power. Great scientists be- 
lieve that they have fully established its 
existence. They have demonstrated be- 
yond a doubt that it can be carried on 
between living persons, provided their 
minds are so mutually receptive and at- 
tuned as to exclude difficulties of trans- 
mission. This may seem an extravagant 
statement, but it should be recalled that 
even a mechanical instrument, such as 
wireless telegraphy mechanism, must be 
"tuned" to receive messages properly. 
The analogy holds, and the condition ob- 
tains to a far greater extent when the 
human mind is the mechanism, which is 
an inconceivably more delicate and sensi- 
tive instrument. 

If corporeal persons can communicate 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 37 

telepathically, how much more easily, sci- 
entists assert, can disembodied beings 
who are not hindered by the gross mate- 
rial existence, and who possess dimensions 
and powers of a character of which we 
are beginning to get the merest glimpse. 
Is the creature, they query, more power- 
ful than the creator? All of the wonder- 
ful complex attributes of civilization 
spring primarily from one faculty — 
thought. If a wireless machine, which is 
the product of thought, can flash messages 
thousands of miles through the ether, can- 
not the creator of that machine, which is 
thought, do even more extraordinary 
feats, independently of material means, 
once it fully understands and learns to 
operate its powers? This is what scien- 
tists pointedly ask, while they are busily 
seeking a solution. 



m .• 



38 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

CLAIRVOYANCE 

Clairvoyance, which is the faculty of 
supernormal, lucid seeing — that is to say, 
a sight entirely distinct from purely 
human sight, and bears an analogy to 
perspicacity — is inseparably related to 
telepathy. One instance of a large num- 
ber of occurrences investigated by scien- 
tists will suffice to show the illimitable 
scope of the clairvoyant faculty. This 
particular case was exhaustively investi- 
gated by Professor William James, and a 
full account written by him was published 
recently in the Proceedings of the Amer- 
ican Society for Psychical Research. 

Miss Bertha Huse, a young woman liv- 
ing in Enfield, New Hampshire, suddenly 
disappeared early one morning. She was 
last seen on a bridge on Lake Mascoma 
near by. On the supposition that she had 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 39 

been drowned, her employer, George 
Whitney, a mill owner, employed a pro- 
fessional diver from Boston to drag the 
lake thoroughly. After three days' 
search no trace of her body was found. 
On the evening of the third day, Mrs. 
George Titus, living at the village of 
Lebanon, four miles away, suddenly fell 
into a trance. On waking up, she in- 
formed her husband that she had had a 
vision in which she saw the exact position 
of Bertha's body in the lake. Her hus- 
band and the village folk laughed at her, 
but she insisted upon driving over to En- 
field. The diver was still in the village. 
He was disinclined to take up the work 
again, saying that he had explored the 
lake thoroughly. Finally he consented. 
The body was found in a deep, dark hole 
in the exact spot indicated by Mrs. Titus. 
"It was so dark down there," said the 



40 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

diver, Michael J. Sullivan, employed by 
the Boston Tugboat Company, "that I 
could not see my way. I had to feel." 

This was a case of pure clairvoyance. 
The great question is: What intelli- 
gence guided Mrs. Titus? Certainly not 
her own, nor that of any other incarnate 
living being. Neither did chance nor 
coincidence have any part. Science ex- 
plains it in but one way. The vision, it 
says, was telepathically put into Mrs. Ti- 
tus' mind by an external influence, that 
of one of those disembodied intelligences 
who are not bounded by time or space, 
and who have the supreme faculties of 
both retrocognition and precognition — 
faculties absent from the human race. 
That the vision could have proceeded 
from her subconscious knowledge is a 
theory not considered tenable. 

Were this an isolated instance no posi- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 41 

tive deduction could be made from it. 
But many scientists, including William 
James, Sir Oliver Lodge, James H. 
Hyslop, of the American Society for 
Psychical Research, have investigated 
many similar cases, and others have car- 
ried on the most rigid investigations with 
Mrs. Leonora Piper, the noted Ameri- 
can medium, whose mediumship is in- 
tellectual rather than physical. Charles 
Richet has described a series of note- 
worthy experiments. Other scientists 
have deeply studied examples of clair- 
voyance elsewhere. Recently a Swed- 
ish boy of fourteen, John Flottner, has 
caused a great sensation in Europe by 
his display of clairvoyant powers. Not 
long ago on one occasion he found, by 
what he called his "inner vision," the 
body of a drowned man, for whom a 
party of seventy persons had searched in 



42 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

vain for three weeks. In his case, as in 
the case of Mrs. Titus, the facts were 
telepathically communicated to his mind 
by an intelligence who knew where the 
body lay, and who, since no mundane 
person could have possessed that knowl- 
edge, as was proved beyond doubt, must 
have been supermundane. This boy is 
under close observation by the Swedish 
society. 

AUTOMATIC WRITING 

An even better substantiated phase 
of psychic phenomena than telepathy 
and clairvoyance, which I have already 
briefly described, is that of automatic 
writing and talking. The world's great- 
est scientists are convinced, after half a 
century of investigation, that in auto- 
matic writing and talking they have dis- 
covered an absolutely certain method of 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 43 

giving and receiving messages from the 
so-called dead. "We have discovered," 
said Sir Oliver Lodge, in a recent ad- 
dress to the British Society for Psychical 
Research, "that there is a new human 
faculty for communicating with the 
dead. The most important set of phe- 
nomena are those of automatic writing 
and talking." 

When Sir Oliver used the word "dis- 
covered," he undoubtedly meant it not 
in a literal, but in a scientific sense. It 
is a grave question whether many of the 
illustrious personages of the past, such 
as prophets, philosophers, and poets, 
were not automatic writers and talkers. 
Thus, to mention one instance, Socrates 
was guided by a certain "monitory 
voice" which, according to him, con- 
stantly guided him, and which, when a 
word from him at his trial would have 



44 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

saved his life, commanded him to remain 
silent. 

The evidence of past centuries, how- 
ever, cannot be considered scientific 
proof. But science believes that it has 
copiously demonstrated the actuality of 
the phenomenon. It seems fairly well 
established that a certain portion of these 
written or spoken messages originate in 
the medium's own subliminal mind. 
Most of us imagine that we are fully 
conscious of all within us. This, scien- 
tific research shows is a great error. 
Beneath our conscious self lies a vast 
region of mind, uprushes of which come 
to the surface only now and then. That 
distinguished English poet and scientist, 
Frederic W. H. Myers, whose work on 
psychical research, "Human Personal- 
ity and Its Survival of Bodily Death" is 
one of the greatest and most remarkable 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 45 

constructive works of genius of modern 
times, compared the area of our sunken 
consciousness to an iceberg, nine-tenths 
of the bulk of which is submerged. 

But in much of the writing and talk- 
ing of automatic character scientifically 
investigated, there is a great part that 
cannot possibly proceed from within the 
mind or from any embodied mind what- 
ever. Wallace, Crookes, Lodge, and 
their colleagues do not doubt that the 
force or intelligence exerted is purely 
extraneous. 

To make this clear it is only necessary 
to point out that when the medium falls 
into a trance state, the resulting writing 
ceases to be in the medium's own style 
and chirography, and frequently becomes 
like that of the communicating intelli- 
gence. Yet, in practically all of the cases 
under investigation, it has been proved 



46 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

that the medium did not know and could 
not have known anything of the hand- 
writing of the particular departed intel- 
ligence giving the messages. Nor is this 
all. Events, dates, identifications, inti- 
mate details, the most profound secrets, 
have been conveyed, which the me- 
dium could not by any possibility have 
known. 

James, Hodgson, Lodge, Crookes, 
Hyslop, and Newbold have published 
voluminous accounts of their experi- 
ments with Mrs. Piper. Mrs. Piper's 
"controls" are several — a Dr. Phinuit, 
"Imperator," "Rector" and others. 
Through her they have spoken and writ- 
ten messages, not only divulging details 
which no living person, even the intended 
recipients, could have known, but fore- 
casting events, such as the death of Rich- 
ard Hodgson from too violent exercise — 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 47 

a warning which the doctor disregarded 
only to fall dead at the Gymnasium of 
The Union Boat Club. 

Flournoy carried on a similar series 
of experiments with the noted Swiss 
medium, Mile. Helene Smith (which 
name, by the way, is a pseudonym, for 
she dislikes publicity), and in summing 
up the phenomena that he observed, the 
professor says of her that she possesses 
the phase of automatic writing of an 
extraordinary character, "divinations, 
mysterious finding of lost objects, happy 
inspirations, exact presentiments, and 
just intuitions." 

In his "Preliminary Report on the 
Trance Phenomena of Mrs. Smead," 
which has been published in the Pro- 
ceedings of the American Society for 
Psychical Research, Professor Hyslop 
describes many striking instances of 



48 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

automatic writing. In these, Dr. Hodg- 
son and others communicated through 
Mrs. Smead messages relating to events 
and incidents of a character which it 
was impossible for Mrs. Smead to know 
about. 

Cases of automatic writing and talk- 
ing are numerous enough to fill vol- 
umes. William T. Stead, the noted 
English journalist, asserts that he wrote 
that remarkable work, "Letters from 
Julia," automatically, and produces evi- 
dence to prove his claim. As for auto- 
matic talking, one of the most remark- 
able of the many modern examples is 
that of Laura Edmunds, a daughter of 
J. W. Edmunds, of New York City, who 
was for many years on the Supreme 
Court bench. Judge Edmunds vouched 
for the fact that the only language she 
knew besides English was a school smat- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 49 

tering of French. Yet when in a trance 
state, under the influence of her "con- 
trols," she spoke thirteen languages flu- 
ently, including Greek, Polish, Italian, 
and Indian. "This happened," says 
Judge Edmunds, "in the presence of 
eight or ten persons, all educated, intelli- 
gent, reasonable, and all as capable as 
any one of distinguishing between illu- 
sion and real fact." This case in par- 
ticular has been an insuperable stumb- 
ling-block to those who advance the 
hypothesis that automatic writing and 
talking are purely functions of the sub- 
conscious mind. 

In * The Immortality of the Soul, Sir 
Oliver Lodge says: 

"It is true that messages are often 
vague and disappointing even when ap- 
parently genuine; untrue that they are 

*Ball Publishing Co. 



50 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

invariably futile and useless and inappro- 
priate, — such an assertion could only be 
made by people imperfectly acquainted 
with the facts. In certain cases it is quite 
clear that a bodily organism has been 
controlled by something other than its 
usual and normal intelligence, and in a 
few cases the identity of the control has 
been almost crucially established." 

Addicted as he is to great reserve in 
language, Sir Oliver speaks in still more 
definite and unmistakable terms, "On 
the question of the life hereafter," 
he said in part, "the excavators are en- 
gaged in boring a tunnel from the oppo- 
site ends. Amid the roar of the water 
and the other noises, we are beginning to 
hear the strokes of the pickaxes of our 
comrades on the other side. We have 
received what an investigation has 
proved to be messages from the dead 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 51 

through the mediums, Mrs. Piper and 
Mrs. Verrall. The latter is endowed to 
a remarkable degree with the power to 
act as a translator or interpreter of the 
psychical and the physical worlds." 

In making this assertion Sir Oliver did 
not reveal the nature of the experiments. 
He announced that he would not antici- 
pate the facts contained in the report, 
but would ask the world to wait until the 
report itself comprehensively appeared, 
when a more proper judgment could be 
formed of the bases upon which he and 
his associates rested their conclusions. 
This report is summarized in the follow- 
ing pages. 



CHAPTER III 

CONCORDANT AUTOMATISMS 

IT was by no means a secret that the ex- 
perimenters had the purpose in view 
of attempting to carry on definite, un- 
mistakable communications with the 
spirits of Frederic W. H. Myers and Dr. 
Richard Hodgson. Clergyman, poet, 
classical scholar, and scientist, Myers was 
a luminously brilliant investigator of 
psychical phenomena. He was a lead- 
ing member of the British Society for 
Psychical Research, with a genius for 
fathoming the secrets of the great un- 
known, and his death in 1901 was greatly 
deplored. Dr. Richard Hodgson was 
long the secretary of the American 

52 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 53 

Branch of the British Society for Psy- 
chical Research, and gave up years of his 
life to a painstaking, patient study of the 
whole range of psychical phenomena, 
closely questioning each, and distinguish- 
ing the genuine from the false. 

Apart, however, from the meagre in- 
formation that the experimenters pur- 
posed to get into communication, if pos- 
sible, with the discarnate intelligences of 
Myers and Hodgson, nothing was known 
of the methods of the experimenters or 
of the results of the tests. This knowl- 
edge was carefully guarded from the out- 
side world until the tests were brought to 
a conclusion and the results compared 
and weighed. 

To make the experiments as conclusive 
as the brain of mortal men could con- 
ceive the British Society for Psychical 
Research decided to put various well- 



54 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

known mediums through a series of "con- 
cordant automatisms." Popularly ex- 
plained, this means that arrangements 
were made to have parts of the same pur- 
ported messages from spirit land con- 
veyed through different mediums at the 
same time although at a distance. One 
part, it was planned, would come 
through Mrs. Piper at one place, another 
part through Mrs. Verrall at another 
place, and other parts through the agency 
of other mediums at still other places. 
This system of cross-correspondence was 
an original one; it had never been tried 
before; and at every stage it was sub- 
jected to the severest and most rigid 
scientific precaution and tests. 

MRS. PIPER IN ENGLAND 

At the invitation of the Council of the 
British Society for Psychical Research 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 55 

Mrs. Piper went to England. The man- 
agement of the sittings was intrusted by 
the council to a committee composed of 
the Right Hon. G. W. Balfour, then 
president of the society; Sir Oliver 
Lodge; Frank Podmore, a well-known 
impartial critic of the spiritistic hypoth- 
esis; Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, now presi- 
dent of the society, and J. G. Piddington. 
This committee decided that the main 
objects of the experiments to be con- 
ducted with Mrs. Piper should be to en- 
courage the developments of certain con- 
trols which had already been manifesting 
in her trance. These controls were dis- 
carnate intelligences giving the names of 
Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers and 
Richard Hodgson. 

Mrs. Piper gave seventy-four sittings 
in all. The first thirteen of these were 
held either at Liverpool or Edgbaston 



56 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

under the direction of Sir Oliver Lodge. 
Then followed fifty-eight sittings in Lon- 
don, Mr. Piddington being in charge 
of thirty-five, Mrs. Sidgwick of nineteen, 
and Miss Alice Johnson of two others. 
All of the London sittings, with the ex- 
ception of five at Mrs. Piper's flat, took 
place in the smoking room of the Irish 
Literary Society at 20 Hanover Square, 
which the committee had rented for the 
purpose. At these sittings the person in 
charge was present before the trance be- 
gan, and remained until Mrs. Piper re- 
gained normal consciousness. In no 
case did the investigator enter the seance 
room or come in contact with Mrs. Piper 
until she was fully entranced, and in 
every case left the room before the end 
of the trance, not to come into contact 
again with Mrs. Piper until the next or 
some subsequent trance was in progress. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 57 

While Mrs. Piper was producing au- 
tomatic writing in either Liverpool, 
Edgbaston, or London, five other medi- 
ums or psychics were being experimented 
with simultaneously at different and dis- 
tant places. These were Mrs. Verrall, 
the wife of the noted English scholar; 
her daughter, Miss Helen Verrall ; Mrs. 
Thompson, and two ladies known to the 
British Society for Psychical Research 
under the pseudonyms of Mrs. Forbes 
and Mrs. Holland. Mrs. Thompson's 
participation, however, was cut short by 
the unexpected death of her husband. 
Most of Mrs. Verrall's automatic writing 
was done either at Cambridge or Mat- 
lock Bath, or on the train between Lon- 
don and Cambridge. Mrs. Verrall 
wrote automatically at other places. 
Both Mrs. and Miss Verrall knew that 
experiments were being made with Mrs. 



58 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Piper, but Mrs. Holland was in India, 
and throughout the entire series of ex- 
periments remained in absolute igno- 
rance of what was written by the other 
mediums. So likewise, did Mrs. Piper, 
"unless," the report says, "it be that she 
remembers in her normal state things said 
to her during her trances, and even then 
the evidential value of the results would 
be unaffected, for all she could have 
learned in this way was either that an ex- 
periment had been successfully accom- 
plished or that it had failed." 

The script of Mrs. Verrall and that of 
Miss Verrall were sent at first to Mr. 
Piddington and then to Miss Alice John- 
son, a leading member of the British So- 
ciety, who in every case noted on the en- 
velope or on the script itself the date and 
hour when it reached them. Mrs. 
Holland's script was sent to Miss John- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 59 

son, who indorsed each script with the 
date of its arrival. In all, about one 
hundred and twenty experiments in 
cross-correspondence were made. 

"The external features of Mrs. Piper's 
trance," says the report, "may be briefly 
described as follows : Mrs. Piper sits at 
a table with a pile of cushions in front of 
her, and composes herself to go into a 
trance. After an interval varying from 
two or three to ten minutes her head 
drops on the cushions, with the face 
turned to the left and the eyes closed, 
her right hand falling at the same time 
onto a small table placed on her right 
side. A pencil is put between her fin- 
gers, and the hand proceeds to write. 
The writing being done without the aid 
of sight, and with the arm in a more or 
less strained position, it is often difficult 



60 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

to decipher, at least without practice; but 
in spite of its not being easy to read, it 
is remarkably consistent in character, so 
that its peculiarities once grasped the 
correct interpretation of all but a very 
few words is not a matter of conjecture. 

The coming out of the trance is a 
longer process than the going into trance. 
After the hand has ceased to write the 
medium remains quiescent for a few min- 
utes. She then raises herself slowly, and 
often with difficulty, from the cushions. 
When the body is erect she begins to 
speak. Her utterance at first is usually 
indistinct, but as she gradually regains 
her normal condition it becomes clearer. 

All of the sittings which Mrs. Piper 
gave in England were, with one excep- 
tion, "writing" and not "voice" sittings; 
that is to say, her automatism took the 
form of writing and not of speech, except 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 6l 

during the waking stage. The "writing" 
sittings possess one advantage over the 
"voice" sittings, namely, that the auto- 
matic phenomena which occur in them 
by their very nature record themselves." 

The report declares that the trance 
script was always kept out of Mrs. 
Piper's sight, and taken away at the end 
of the sitting, so that she never saw it or 
had access to it at any time. In her 
normal condition she neither asked for 
nor received any information whatever 
about what had happened at the sittings, 
except that "she was occasionally told 
that the results were considered interest- 
ing and promising, and that they were of 
a different nature from what had previ- 
ously been obtained." 

At the very beginning of the sittings 
there came correspondence of the most 



62 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

definite character in the production of 
which there seemed to be the fullest evi- 
dences both of supernormal intelligent 
direction and of ingenuity. On Jan. 27, 
1907, at 12:30 P.M., Calcutta time 
(6:30 A.M. Greenwich time), Mrs. 
Holland during a trance at Calcutta au- 
tomatically wrote a script containing the 
names Francis and Ignatius. Some five 
or six hours later, at a sitting in London, 
Mr. Piddington asked what purported 
to be the spirit of Myers what were the 
real names of Mrs. Piper's two controls 
who called themselves "Imperator" and 
"Rector." Myers, according to Mr. 
Piddington, spontaneously replied by the 
medium of Mrs. Piper's automatic writ- 
ing that they were Francis and Ignatius. 
It is possible that these coincidences 
might have been accidental, but this ob- 
jection could not be applied by any proc- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 63 

ess of reasoning to the results of the sit- 
ting of Jan. 1 6, 1907. 

At this sitting Mrs. Piper fell into her 
usual trance, and the spirit of Myers pur- 
ported to appear, writing by her hand. 
To make a definite, unmistakable test 
Mr. Piddington asked Myers to draw a 
certain design when giving his messages 
through other mediums. The report 
describes this conversation through Mrs. 
Piper: 

Piddington: Myers, when you send 
a message to, say, Mrs, V err all, and then a 
similar message to Mrs. Holland, could 
you not mark each with some simple but 
distinctive design? 

Myers: I am not quite sure that I 
understand you. Do you mean when 
I give a message to make a sign after or 
before the written message? 

Piddington: Yes; if you wrote, for 



64 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

instance, "sunshine" through Mrs, Ver- 
rall, and then afterwards through Mrs, 
Holland, you might put, say, a triangle 
within a circle, or some simple sign like 
that, to show that there is another mes- 
sage to be looked for corresponding with 
the message so marked. 

When the investigators received the 
script of Mrs. Verrall's automatic writ- 
ing they were immensely astonished and 
highly gratified to note in it a circle with 
triangle within it distinctly drawn. This 
script embodied a cross-correspondence 
which Sir Oliver Lodge and his associate 
experimenters at once were forced to con- 
clude was undoubtedly successful. Mrs. 
Verrall's drawing was unmistakable. 
Although one of Mrs. Holland's scripts 
written in far-off India contained geo- 
metrical drawings in which were a circle 
and a triangle, the cross-correspondence 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 65 

in this case was really confined to the 
three mediums, Mrs. Verrall, Miss Ver- 
rall and Mrs. Piper. 

The communications in which the 
figure of a triangle within a circle ap- 
peared were very remarkable. Com- 
municating through Mrs. Piper, Myers 
asked a few days later whether Mrs. Ver- 
rall had received the word ''Evangelical." 
As Mr. Piddington had not as yet seen 
Mrs. Verrall's latest script, he replied 
that he did not know, but would inquire. 
Myers then said that he and Hodgson 
were together and were communicating 
through George Pelham, one of Mrs. 
Piper's spirit "controls." Myers said 
that in his messages through Mrs. Ver- 
rall he had repeatedly referred to Brown- 
ing's poems. "Look out," he wrote, "for 
Hope, Star, and Browning." This cryp- 
tic communication puzzled Mr. Pid- 



66 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

dington. At a subsequent sitting with 
Mrs. Piper, George Pelham announced 
that Myers had given the name "Evelyn 
Hope" through Mrs. Verrall. It then 
appeared from Myers's explanation that 
this was the name he had been trying to 
give through "Rector," another of Mrs. 
Piper's controls, but that "Rector" had 
put it down as "Evangelical." Hence, 
Mr. Piddington understood that "Evan- 
gelical" was the word Myers had given 
through Mrs. Verrall. "It was very 
stupid of 'Rector,' " wrote George Pel- 
ham, "as Hodgson and Myers had kept 
repeating it over and over again to him." 
"It will," comments Mr. Piddington, 
"I think, be allowed that the modifica- 
tion of Evangelical into Evelyn Hope 
was spontaneous and not traceable to any 
suggestion from me. Indeed, I could 
not have given such a suggestion, as be- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 67 

yond the fact that 'Evelyn Hope' brought 
in the word 'hope' again, it conveyed at 
the time no more meaning to me than the 
word 'evangelical'; and, moreover, I did 
not then know that it was the title of one 
of Browning's poems." 

The significance of Myers's purported 
requests to look out for "Hope, Star, and 
Browning" was made clear. When 
Mrs. Verrall's script came, it contained 
quotations from Browning's poem and 
also these lines : 

"That gives the words, but an ana- 
gram would be better. Tell him that — 
rats, star, tars, and so on. Try this. It 
has been tried before. REATS, rear- 
range these five letters, or, again, tears, 
stare." 

To get the connecting link it is now 
necessary to quote Mr. Piddington. He 
says: 



68 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

"When by reason of the coincidences 
involved, my mind began to concentrate 
itself on these two pieces of script (Mrs. 
Verrall's) and the words 'Hope, Star, 
Browning,' given in the Piper trance, a 
vague impression came over me that the 
words 'rats, arts, star' had somehow and 
somewhere come under my eyes before. 

At first I thought this must be a mere 
fancy, and when, after a little, I seemed 
to remember having seen them written 
on a piece of paper in Dr. Hodgson's 
handwriting when I went through his 
private papers in the early Summer of 
1906, at Boston, I was inclined to accuse 
myself of suffering from a delusion of 
memory. 

Still, the memory — real or fancied — 
persisted, and to satisfy myself I wrote to 
Dr. Hodgson's executors in Boston, Mr. 
George Dorr and Mr. Henry James, Jr., 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 69 

and asked them to search among the odds 
and ends, which, with other matter, such 
as letters, I had handed over, for a scrap 
of paper with the words 'rats, arts, star' 
upon it. On Aug. 23, 1907, Mr. James 
sent me the sheet of paper containing a 
rough draft of anagrams in the hand- 
writing of Dr. Hodgson. 

I confess that when this came into my 
hands I felt as I suppose people do when 
they have seen a ghost; for, though not 
surprised to see the 'rats, arts, star' ana- 
gram, I was positively startled when I 
saw the anagram 'rates, stare, tears, 
aster,' &c, of which I had no recollec- 
tion whatever." 

Nor is this all. In the Browning 
poem, written automatically by Mrs. 
Verrall, there appeared the drawing of 
a circle with a triangle inclosed. But 
the coincidence did not end there. Miss 



70 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Helen Verrall had also been receiving 
automatic communications, each of 
which contained the drawing of a star 
and the word "star" — a combination not 
found elsewhere in Miss Verrall's auto- 
matic, writing during the remainder of 
the experiments. These star drawings 
were followed by the words : "That was 
the sign." Many other distinct points of 
connection were noted in the cross-corre- 
spondence communicated through three 
mediums. The committee for the Brit- 
ish Society for Psychical Research could 
not avoid considering the hypothesis that 
Myers and Hodgson were both commu- 
nicating at the same time, and that each 
was giving certain recognized signs of 
identity and certain tests, the significance 
of which was clear and indisputable. 

On Feb. n, 1907, Mrs. Verrall, as it 
was learned later, drew three converging 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 71 

arrows. On the next day what pur- 
ported to be Hodgson's spirit announced 
through Mrs. Piper that as a test he had 
given "Arrow" to Mrs. Verrall. After 
this sitting Mr. Piddington received 
Mrs. Verrall's script, confirming Hodg- 
son's statement. On Feb. 17, Miss Ver- 
rall, living at a distance from her mother, 
automatically drew an arrow, followed 
by the words, "many together." Mrs. 
VerralPs script, written at 11:15 A.M., 
on Feb. 18, contained several words be- 
ginning with a and ar. On the same day 
about 11:30 A.M., Hodgson, through 
Mrs. Piper, reminded Mr. Piddington to 
"watch for arrow." On Feb. 19, Pid- 
dington first saw Mrs. Verrall's script of 
Feb. 18, and Miss VerralPs of Feb. 17. 
On Feb. 20, Hodgson inquired: "Got ar- 
row yet?" Mr. Piddington answered 
that Mrs. Verrall had not written the 



72 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

word, but had drawn arrows. Hodgson 
replied that he would make further 
attempts to have Mrs. Verrall write "ar- 
row." On March 18, Mrs. Verrall 
automatically drew a bow and arrow, an 
arrow and a target. On June 4, Mrs. 
Verrall learned for the first time that 
arrow had been the subject of a cross- 
correspondence experiment. 

The "laurel wreath" test of Feb. 26 
was another striking experiment. On 
that day the "control" George Pelham, 
speaking through Mrs. Piper, announced 
that "he had given her the words 
'laurel wreath.' " The "her" evidently 
referred to another medium. On the 
following day the spirit of Myers pur- 
ported to be communicating through 
Mrs Piper. Myers said that he had 
given the words "laurel wreath" to Mrs. 
Verrall. When Mrs. Verrall's auto- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 73 

matic script arrived it was found to be- 
gin with the phrase, "Laurels and an- 
other." As it went on the words "laurel 
bough" occurred several times. Finally 
in the last lines was written the phrase 
"laurel wreath," followed by these broken 
sentences : 

"Corona laureata (laurel crown) has 
some meaning here. 

With laureata wreath his brow serene 
was crowned. 

No more to-day — await the better news 
that brings assurance with a laurel 
crown." 

This script was covered with drawings 
representing laurel leaves and a laurel 
wreath. Neither the word "laurel" nor 
"wreath" was written or represented by 
drawings in any other of Mrs. VerralPs 
script at any time. 

The report thus conservatively ob- 



74 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

serves: "The extracts given explain 
themselves, and need no comment, except 
it be to remark that whatever the agency 
it is that effects the coincident phenom- 
ena, it is not a force that is working 
blindly and mechanically, but with in- 
telligence and design." 

CROSSING THE BAR 

The following extracts from an article 
by John W. Graham, M.A., in The Hib- 
bert Journal sum up Mr. Piddington's 
report on this incident: 

On the 29th of January 1907, Mrs. 
Verrall propounded to the Myers of the 
Piper trance a test question, which had 
been carefully selected so as to be wholly 
meaningless to Mrs. Piper herself, and to 
suggest matter which was so familiar to 
Frederic Myers in his life, and had en- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 75 

tered so fully into his habitual thoughts, 
that there was good hope of his recollect- 
ing it. On account of the difficulty of 
getting questions through the well-inten- 
tioned but rather ill-educated amanuensis 
called "Rector," who appears to work 
Mrs. Piper's hand, the question had to be 
very short; and in order to avoid the 
chance of lucky guesses, and to make the 
result comfortably certain, this short 
question was to be such as would have 
large allusiveness, and might open up 
many recollections in the mind of Myers. 
It was thought also that if the question 
bore some kind of affinity to a subject 
already touched by Myers, though an 
affinity unrecognisable by the medium, 
there would be still more hope that his 
mind would again travel on that path. 
It was also necessary that the result 
should be verifiable, and not dependent 



76 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

upon Mrs. Verrall's or upon anyone else's 
impressions. These conditions appeared 
to be all fulfilled by the three Greek 
words cujtos ovpavbs aKVfKav ("the very heavens 
without a wave"), which were painfully 
spelt out, frequently repeated so as to be 
transmitted correctly, and plainly caught 
by Myers on the above date. 

These words are from the Enneades of 
Plotinus, and are part of a description of 
the circumstances which accompany and 
condition ecstasy; that is, the condition in 
which the soul is sufficiently separated 
from the body, or from the bodily inter- 
ests, to be in such close communion with 
the divine as to receive visions in rapt 
contemplation. The last of the three 
words is a rare one, not known even to 
Mr. Piddington, still less, of course, to 
the absolutely Greekless minds of Mrs. 
Piper and of "Rector." 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 77 

Now for the connection of the words 
with F. W. H. Myers. In his treatment 
of Ecstasy in Human Personality (Epi- 
logue, vol. ii, p. 291), he quotes the para- 
graph in which they occur, not in Greek 
but in English. He translates the sen- 
tence containing them — "Calm be the 
earth, the sea, the air, and let Heaven 
itself be still." Moreover, the actual 
Greek words are used by Myers as the 
motto to his poem on Tennyson, which is 
printed in Fragments of Prose and Poetry 
(p. 117). These words, which state that 
clear outward calm in nature is propitious 
to the trance condition of ecstasy, were 
pretty sure to have been often pondered 
by Myers in writing his careful inquiry 
into the experience of ecstasy — an in- 
quiry, it is safe to say, more scientific, 
more wide in its outlook, alike more 
penetrating and more comprehensive, 



78 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

than any preceding treatment of the phe- 
nomenon. It was therefore reasonable to 
expect that Myers would still be able to 
translate the words and to quote illus- 
trative allusions to its subject matter from 
Tennyson and from Plotinus, and pos- 
sibly from his own works. It was not yet 
seen by any of the experimenters how 
closely connected were Tennyson and 
Plotinus in the mind of Myers, and prob- 
ably also in the mind of Tennyson him- 
self; and how deeply appropriate it was 
that that motto from Plotinus should be 
placed at the head of a poem on Tenny- 
son. The words out of that poem to 
which the motto is appropriate are 
these : — 

Once more he rises; lulled and still, 
Hushed to his tune the tideways roll; 

These waveless heights of evening thrill 
With voyage of the summoned Soul. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 79 

The allusion is, of course, to Tenny- 
son's Crossing the Bar; they are indeed 
little but a paraphrase of that lovely 
lyric : — 

And may there be no moaning of the bar, 

When I put out to sea, 
But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the bound- 
less deep 
Turns again home. 

We have therefore to do with the idea of 
calm, particularly as a preliminary to 
spiritual exaltation; calm of nature as 
conducive to calm of spirit; and we shall 
expect, if the experiment be successful, 
allusions to that idea in Tennyson, and 
reference to Plotinus. 

It was carefully discovered that Mrs. 
Piper had never seen the volume, Frag- 
ments of Prose and Poetry, and even if 



/ 



80 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

she had read the English rendering of the 
words in Human Personality, it would 
not convey the Greek. 

A previous connection with the words 
"halcyon days" in Mrs. Verrall's script 
was, as was intended, remote and un- 
recognisable. Let it be remembered that 
we have to do in this investigation with 
the operation of a mind which appears to 
dream, and to bring out of its treasures 
unexpected allusions, glimmering at- 
tempts at a central idea, which it appar- 
ently takes time and effort for the speaker 
to make clear, and then to pass through 
an ill-made machine. It is something 
like writing a letter in the dark, which 
you hand to a sleepy postman, who will 
carry it through an unknown land, past 
ancient block-houses of prohibitive tar- 
iffs and along unsealed passes, to a tem- 
porary and movable address; and the re- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 81 

sponses are brought by dictation to an 
illiterate scribe, who does not always 
know the meaning of what he writes. 

We shall not, therefore, be surprised 
that the first answers to the test question 
were glimmering approaches to it only. 
The day that the question was pro- 
pounded, Myers, through Mrs. Piper, al- 
luded to a "haven of rest," which he con- 
nected with a low armchair in Mrs. 
Verrall's house, and to "celestial halcyon 
days," both of which he claimed to have 
referred to in her earlier script since he 
left this life. This was, on the whole, a 
well-founded claim, and it was doubtless 
made because Mrs. Verrall had told him 
that the answer to her question would 
have some slight connection with some- 
thing previously given. We thus see him 
on the right track, having apparently 
caught the idea of calm. He went on to 



82 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

speak of "larches" and "laburnum." A 
dreamer who was dreaming of Tennyson 
in connection with the word "halcyon" 
might easily pass on to the verse: — 

When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, 
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush ; 
Or underneath the barren bush 

Flits by the sea-blue bird of March. 

For the "sea-blue bird of March" is the 
kingfisher or halcyon. Just at the end of 
the sitting, however, all that could be 
expressed was the word "larches," and 
that led on to another nature reminiscence 
from In Memoriam: "laburnums drop- 
ping wells of fire." All this would de- 
serve the name of fanciful if it stood 
alone; but we will proceed. 

We now turn to Mrs. Verrall's script, 
which on the 12th of February ran 
thus : — 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 83 

The voyage of Maeldune faery lands for- 
lorn and noises of the western sea — 
thundering noises of the western sea. 

It is about Merlin and Arthur's realm — 
Merlin's prophetic vision — "all night 
long mid thundering noises of the 
western sea" and how he would not 
go — the passing of Arthur. 

And then the island valley of Avilion where 
blows not any wind nor ever falls 
the least light — no not that but you 
have the sense — there falls no rain 
nor snow nor any breath of wind 
shakes the least leaf. 

I will try to get the idea elsewhere con- 
veyed — but it is hard and I know I 
have failed before. Why will you 
not put the signature? Surely you 
know now that it is not you. 
FWHM. 

Here we have more Tennysonian calm 
with the island valley of Avilion, which 
he could not manage to quote quite cor- 
rectly. The words near the end, "Why 



84 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

will you not put the signature? Surely 
you know now that it is not you. 
FWHM," appear to be remarks which 
have leaked through, addressed by 
Myers to Mrs. Verrall .as medium. 

The Keats quotation "faery lands for- 
lorn," is also used as title of a poem by 
Myers published in his Fragments, and in 
that poem are references to "that heaven- 
high vault serene," and "unearthly 
calms." He is thus giving a clear al- 
lusion from his own words to the idea 
required of him. Myers's poem speaks 
of a voyage north from Aalesund to 
"Isles unnamed in gulfs unvoyaged," 
just as does the Voyage of Maeldune. 

We have, therefore, here an allusion 
than which few could have been more 
characteristic of Myers and more appro- 
priate to the idea he was desired to con- 
vey. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 85 

On the 25th of February Mrs. Verrall's 
hand wrote: — 

I stretch my hand across the vapourous 
space, the interlunar space — twixt 
moon and earth — where the gods of 
Lucretius quaff their nectar. Do* you 
not understand? 

The lucid interspace of world and world 
— Well, that is bridged by the 
thought of a friend, bridged before 
for your passage, but to-day for the 
passage of any that will walk it, not 
in hope but in faith. 

Here is an allusion to the Lucretius of 
Tennyson, to a passage descriptive alto- 
gether of calm contemplation and such 
communion as is possible to men :— 

The Gods, who haunt 
The lucid interspace of world and world, 
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, 
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, 
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 



86 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Their sacred everlasting calm! And such, 
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm, 
Not such nor all unlike it, man may gain 
Letting his own life go. 

On the next day we have, through Mrs. 
Verrall's hand, the first reference to the 
three Greek words connected with Cross- 
ing the Bar: — 

I think I have made him [probably "Rec- 
tor"] understand, but the best refer- 
ence to it will be made elsewhere, not 
Mrs. Piper at all. I think I have 
got some words from the poem writ- 
ten down — if not stars and satellites, 
another phrase will do as well. And 
may there be no moaning at the bar 
— my Pilot face to face. 

The last poems of Tennyson and Brown- 
ing should be compared. There are 
references in her writing to both — 
Helen's, I mean. 

The fighter fights one last fight, but there 
is peace for him too in the end — and 
peace for the seer who knew that 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 87 

after — after the earthquake, and the 
fire and the wind, after, after, in the 
stillness comes the voice that can be 
heard. 

Here we have the first clear allusion to 
the connection between the motto from 
Plotinus and the poem Crossing the Bar, 
to which it alluded in Myers's poem on 
Tennyson. He evidently feels the diffi- 
culty of communication, and adds that 
though he cannot get the allusion "sunset 
and evening star," he does get part of the 
lines about "the pilot" and the "moaning 
at the bar." He then alludes to the well- 
worn comparison of this last poem of 
Tennyson's with Browning's valediction 
to life: — 

"Strive and thrive ! " cry "Speed, fight on, 
face ever 
There as here." 



88 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

The appropriateness of the comparison 
of Tennyson the seer, to Browning the 
fighter, is plain ; and finally, we have the 
allusion to the "still small voice" heard 
by Elijah on Mount Horeb. 

On the 6th of March Mrs. Verrall's 
hand wrote : — 

I have tried to tell him of the calm, the 
heavenly and earthly calm, but I do 
not think it is clear. I think you 
would understand if you could see the 
record. Tell me when you have un- 
derstood. 

Calm is the sea — and in my heart, if calm 
at all, if any calm, a calm despair. 

That is only part of the answer— just as 
it is not the final thought. The sym- 
phony does not close upon despair — 
but on harmony. So does the poem. 
Wait for the last word. 

Here we have more allusions to the same 
thought, though Myers expresses doubt as 
to whether he has made "Rector" under- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 89 

stand; but he thinks that the record of the 
Piper trances will be plain to Mrs. Ver- 
rall. He then runs in another quotation 
from In Memoriam, but corrects its final 
word, inasmuch as the conclusion of that 
poem is hope and not despair. He put 
his special signature to this bit of script. 
Then on the nth of March we have a 
beautiful passage written by Mrs. Ver- 
rall's hand, dwelling on the fact that both 
Plato and Tennyson had communion with 
the unseen: — 

Violet and olive leaf purple and hoary. 

The city of the violet and olive crown. 

News will come of her. Of Athens 

The shadow of the Parthenon. It is a 
message from Plato that I want to 
send. It has been given elsewhere, 
but should be completed here. It is 
about dim, seen forms, half seen in 
the evenings grey by a boy and after- 
wards woven into words that last — I 



90 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

want to say it again. I think there 
is a verse in Tennyson about it. 

Plato and the shadow and the unseen or 
half-seen companionship — shapes seen 
in the glimpses of the moonlit heights. 

To walk with Plato (or some phrase like 
that) , with voiceless communing, and 
unseen Presence felt. (No, you 
don't get it right.) Presences on the 
eternal hills (that is better). The 
Presence that is on the lonely hills. 
(That is all for now. Wait.) 

This script is an allusion to Frederic 
Myers's poem on The Collected Works 
of G.F. Watts:— . 

Then as he walked, like one who dreamed, 

Through silent highways silver-hoar, 
More wonderful that city seemed, 

And he diviner than before: 
A voice was calling, "All is well" ; 

Clear in the vault Selene shone, 
And over Plato's homestead fell 

The shadow of the Parthenon. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 91 

For purposes of mere evidence it is 
enough to say that Tennyson and Plotinus, 
who were plainly connected in the mind 
of Frederic Myers, were also connected 
in the script; and any reader who feels 
that he would like to keep his mind 
closely bent upon the thread of evidence, 
will do well to skip the following para- 
graphs. It is in itself, however, a deeply 
interesting quest to point out how the 
great mystics in all ages speak the same 
tongue. 

It is well known that Tennyson was all 
his life subject to periods of trance, which 
he could sometimes produce by the device 
of repeating his own name over and over; 
he was "wound into the great Soul," had 
the sensation of leaving his body and liv- 
ing in a larger air, a consciousness of ex- 
alted happiness and communion, at once 



92 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

broken by any interruption, or even by 
his own hand suddenly touching the ta- 
ble. He gives an account of this experi- 
ence in In Memoriam, stanza xcv., in 
The Ancient Sage, and in Arthur's speech 
at the conclusion of the Holy Grail, and 
it is referred to pretty fully in his son's 
Memoir. 

With regard to the particular point of 
the desirability of external calm to induce 
ecstasy, Mrs. Verrall has noted that be- 
fore the trance described in In Me- 
moriam, xcv., there was — 

Calm that let the tapers burn 
Unwavering: not a cricket chirred; 
The brook alone far off was heard, 
And on the board the fluttering urn, 

and that the vision "was stricken through 
with doubt" in the sudden breeze of 
dawn. Mrs. Verrall also points out that 
there are some interesting verbal paral- 






Beyond the Borderline of Life 93 

lels between In Memoriam and Plotinus, 
who speaks of the "illuminating entry of 
the soul bringing a golden vision." Ten- 
nyson speaks of "the spirits' golden day." 
"iEonian" occurs in both writers, and 
both speak of "That which is" as com- 
pared with the present, past, and future 
ideas appropriate to time, which is a mere 
image of eternity. It is known also that 
Arthur Hallam, the subject of In Me- 
moriam, was a student of Plotinus. 

We will now turn to Mrs. Piper's 
trance, which we left on the 30th of Janu- 
ary, giving then its first hints of a solu- 
tion to the question which had been pro- 
pounded to those who write through her 
hand the day before. 

On the 6th of March there were writ- 
ten by her hand the three words, "Cloud- 
less Sky Horizon. Don't you under- 
stand?" and immediately afterwards the 



94 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

sentence: "A cloudless sky beyond the 
horizon." This is a paraphrase of the 
three Greek test-words. Mrs. Piper's 
trance concludes with a waking stage, in 
which, after the writing has ceased, she 
utters all kinds of disconnected sentences, 
during the time when her personality- is 
resuming control, or, as Myers put it, 
through her hand, "When the spirit is 
returning to this light." The things said 
at this time are probably partly Mrs. 
Piper's own and partly from the same 
source as her script; they are often faint, 
and can only be caught by putting the ear 
close to her mouth. 

When she was thus recovering after 
this sitting, she said, "Moaning at the bar 
when I put out to sea." Shortly after she 
uttered "Arthur Hallam" twice, and 
"Good-bye, Margaret" (the Christian 
name of Mrs. Verrall, who, however, was 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 95 

not present). She then said for the third 
time, "Arthur Hallam. Myers said it 
was he. He says that he will give evi- 
dence, and he is glad to know that he had 
a good definite idea in his innermost soul. 
He said it affected his innermost soul to 
talk to you, and he was so glad." 

Then, a week later, at the next sitting, 
Myers, through Mrs. Piper, attempted to 
draw roughly what was said to represent 
a bar — in fact, three attempts at drawing 
it were made altogether. He claimed 
that he had spoken of "crossing the bar" 
to Mrs. Verrall also, which was quite 
true, though at that time unknown 
to Mr. Piddington, the experimenter. 
Myers also declared that he had tried to 
draw a bar with Mrs. Verrall, adding, "I 
thought she might get a glimpse of my 
understanding of her Greek." Then 
Hodgson appeared and asked whether 



96 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Mrs. Verrall had drawn a bar. Myers 
also came and asked the same question. 
As a fact, this drawing had not succeeded, 
though Mrs. Verrall had written, "May 
there be no moaning at the bar." Myers 
replied that he was not sure that he had 
succeeded in giving her the full impres- 
sion, but that he had quoted the words to 
her as well as to Mrs. Piper. He added 
that he had given to Mrs. Piper both the 
words "Arthur Hallam" and the drawing 
of the bar — "so as to get the words with 
the author's individuality." 

These references to Hallam and Cross- 
ing the Bar occurred in Mrs. Piper's 
trance before Mrs. Verrall had grasped 
the significance of the appearances in her 
script of the Tennysonian quotations. 
She did not see the point till six days 
later; and the paraphrase, "cloudless sky 
beyond the horizon/' does not appear 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 97 

with Mrs. Verrall at all, and could not 
have come from her. 

To sum up in the words of Mr. Pid- 
dington: "It appears that in the absence 
of all intercourse between Mrs. Piper and 
Mrs. Verrall after 30th January, on the 
one hand, the 'Myers' of Mrs. Verrall's 
script on 26th February and 6th March 
respectively, connected Crossing the Bar 
and In Memoriam with wro* ovpavb* a/cv>wv; 
while, on the other hand, the 'Myers' of 
Mrs. Piper's trance on 6th March alluded 
to Crossing the Bar and mentioned the 
name 'Arthur Hallam' in close conjunc- 
tion with Mrs. Verrall's Christian name; 
claimed on 13th March to have given to 
Mrs. Verrall a quotation from Crossing 
the Bar, and further explained that he 
thought this reference would make Mrs. 
Verrall understand in part what signifi- 
cance the Greek words had for him." 



98 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

The situation then was that, whilst 
abundant allusion to the Tennysonian 
connection with the three Greek words 
had been made, the passage in Human 
Personality where they are translated, 
and the name of their author Plotinus, 
had not yet appeared. It was therefore 
thought better to see whether this field 
also would yield a harvest, and for that 
purpose Mrs. Verrall sat with Mrs. Piper 
on the 29th of April, and asked Myers 
if he could make allusion to some other 
group of associations, and also give the 
author's name. No clue was given to 
Myers to guide him as "to which of his 
communications had been found to be an- 
swers to the question. 

This was a very confused sitting, pos- 
sibly due to the newness of the experi- 
menters and their difficulty in decipher- 
ing the script; and to everyone's surprise 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 99 

allusions, evidently made with great diffi- 
culty, occurred to Swedenborg, to Dante, 
to St. Paul, and to Francis of Assisi. 
References also occurred to "Azure a 
blue sky," and to "Halcyon days," both 
concordant with the central idea. Still 
this was not what was wanted. 

The next sitting produced even more 
unexpected results, inasmuch as Myers 
stated that the three Greek words re- 
minded him of "Homer's Illiard." This 
piece of illiteracy only shows how great 
are the mechanical difficulties in passing 
a word through. Without definitely 
giving the author's name, we have first an 
attempt to begin the word Plato, and then 
we have the word "Socratese." 

This was very confusing to all the ex- 
perimenters, and seemed as though it 
might be nothing better than bad guess- 
ing; the riddle was hard to read; it was 



100 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

all the better riddle for that, nevertheless. 
Afterwards Mrs. Verrall remembered 
that in Human Personality, near the Plo- 
tinus passage wherein the three Greek 
words are translated, occurs an account 
of the famous vision of Socrates, de- 
scribed in the Crito of Plato, in which a 
fair and white-robed woman appeared to 
him in his prison, and quoted to him, as 
he waited for death, a line from the Iliad 
(ix. 363) — "On the third day hence thou 
comest to Phthia's fertile shore." Soc- 
rates took this as a promise of immortal- 
ity, whence came its fitting place in Hu- 
man Personality. Further, the original 
Greek of this passage from the Crito is 
given as the motto to the Epilogue of Hu- 
man Personality, in which the passage 
from Plotinus occurs. The experimen- 
ters now felt that they understood the 
allusion to the Iliad, though neither the 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 101 

word "Iliad" nor the word "Homer" oc- 
curs in the text of Human Personality at 
that place. Surely no one but Myers 
could have made that allusion. As Mr. 
Piddington says: "It would not, there- 
fore, have been possible for anyone but a 
Greek scholar, familiar with Greek lit- 
erature, to discover from these pages of 
Human Personality any connection be- 
tween the vision of Socrates and Homer's 
Iliad, even if he had sufficient familiarity 
with these pages to be reminded of the 
vision of Socrates by an allusion to the 
vision of Plotinus." 

In this chapter on Ecstasy in Human 
Personality we have the passage: "We 
need not deny the transcendental ecstasy 
to any of the strong souls who have 
claimed to feel it; — to Elijah or to Isaiah, 
to Plato or to Plotinus, to St. John or to 
St. Paul, to Buddha or Mahomet, to 



102 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Virgil or Dante, to St. Theresa or to Joan 
of Arc, to Kant or to Swedenborg, to 
Wordsworth or to Tennyson." 

On the same page we find the passage: 
"Our daily bread is as symbolical as the 
furniture of Swedenborg's heavens and 
hells. . . . Plotinus, 'the eagle soar- 
ing above the tomb of Plato,' is lost to 
sight in the heavens. . . . But the 
prosaic Swede — his stiff mind prickly 
with dogma, the opaque cell walls of his 
intelligence flooded cloudily by the ir- 
radiant day — this man, by the very limi- 
tations of his faculty, by the practical hu- 
mility of a spirit trained to inquiry but 
not to generate truth, has awkwardly laid 
the corner stone, grotesquely sketched the 
elevation of a temple which our remotest 
posterity will be upbuilding and adorn- 
ing still." 

In the Epilogue of Human Personality 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 103 

we find this significant passage: — "I be- 
lieve that some of those who once were 
near to us are already mounting swiftly 
upon this heavenly way. And when 
from that cloud encompassing of un- 
forgetful souls some voice is heard, — as 
long ago, — there needs no heroism, no 
sanctity, to inspire the apostle's emBvpla e« 
ro avaXvao.^ the desire to lift our anchor, 
and to sail out beyond the bar. What 
fitter summons for man than the wish to 
live in the memory of the highest soul 
that he has known, now risen higher — to 
lift into an immortal security the yearn- 
ing passion of his love? 'As the soul 
hasteneth,' says Plotinus, 'to the things 
that are above, she will ever forget the 
more ; unless all her life on earth leave a 
memory of things done well.' " 

Here in one paragraph we have 
Myers's deepest and most original 



104 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

thought, beginning with a quotation from 
the Apostle on whose inward experience 
he had based in earlier life his well- 
known mystical poem St. Paul. Next 
comes an allusion to Crossing the Bar, 
and finally a passage from Plotinus; all 
within a few lines. 

Without actually giving as yet the 
name of the author of the three Greek 
words, it may surely be said that the com- 
munications are full of Myers's rich and 
radiating personality, not easy to mistake 
for anyone else's by any who knew him. 

But we now come to the final achieve- 
ment. On the 6th of May, Mrs. Sidg- 
wick, before she had asked a single ques- 
tion in the Piper trance, was met by the 
word "Plotinus," to be transmitted with 
every sign of triumphant emphasis to 
Mrs. Verrall. The atmosphere of the in- 
terview was like that after an athletic con- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 105 

test in which victory had been won; 
Myers congratulated himself on having 
fully answered the Greek as he had previ- 
ously answered a certain important Latin 
question. He said that he had "caught" 
Rector at their last meeting, and had 
spelled it out to him clearly. 

That there are great difficulties to over- 
come in these transmissions is what we 
should expect; and that it actually is so 
is plain from the gradual process by 
which success arrives. As Mr. Pidding- 
ton acutely remarks, the first shots at the 
Tennysonian allusions in the words 
"larches" and "laburnum" — indirect, 
only partial answers as they were — were 
given on the day after the test question 
was put; and when a new set of associ- 
ations was demanded we had Homer's 
Iliad, Socrates, Swedenborg, St. Paul, 
and Dante — the dramatis personam, in 



106 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

fact, of the concluding chapters of Hu- 
man Personality, before the awakening 
strands of earth memory gave forth the 
name Plotinus. 

By way of guarding against a tele- 
pathic origin for the messages from a 
mind still on earth, it may be noted that 
the whole range of thought and knowl- 
edge is alien from the circle of Mrs. 
Piper's mind; that Mr. Piddington de- 
clares himself to have been wholly un- 
aware of all the literary connections and 
allusions brought out, and wholly unable 
to assist the medium unconsciously in any 
way, and that Mrs. Verrall — the only 
other person concerned — did not know or 
think of a large part of this complex of al- 
lusions, and did not even recognise them 
in the script until the 12th of March, 
which is after the Piper answers of 6th 
March had come. It is also hard to un- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 107 

derstand, if her subliminal mind is to be 
credited with both her own and Mrs. 
Piper's script, why the name Plotinus, 
which must have been on the tip of her 
tongue of expectation all the time, was the 
last to be unearthed. The telepathic hy- 
pothesis will, I think, be found insufficient 
by anyone who reads the scripts. Mrs. 
Verrall's mind is the only one on earth 
which needs consideration as a possible 
source of the knowledge displayed; but it 
is not only knowledge that is displayed, 
but every token of a particular personality. 
There are conversations overheard be- 
tween the communicators, their amanu- 
ensis, and their medium, either spoken 
during the waking stage of trance, or 
written by the hand. Moreover, we must 
remember that we can only properly re- 
gard the subliminal self, enlightening 
generalisation as it is of many phenomena, 



108 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

telephathic, hypnotic, and so forth, as an 
entity provisionally covering a good 
many facts, not as an actually defined or- 
ganism, the bounds of whose faculties are 
even beginning to be known. There may 
be several subliminal selves, or it may be 
rather a link of connection with other 
potencies behind it than a great organ in 
itself. In any case, if all this is due to 
the operation of Mrs. Verrall's underly- 
ing mind, it is entirely unique among our 
records. 

The narrative which I have attempted 
here to summarise, and which covers 65 
pages of Proceedings, Part lvii., is only 
one — though one of the best — of twenty- 
three cross-correspondences described in 
this volume, in addition to the eight 
which were described in Miss Johnson's 
paper on Mrs. Holland in Part lv. The 
care shown over minutiae by Mr. Pid- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 109 

dington, and the perfect candour of his 
exposition, win the reader's confidence; 
his ingenuity in the tracking of allusions, 
and insight into the working of the frag- 
mentary mental operations of the trance 
personalities, is nothing less than delight- 
ful to those who care for intellectual 
athletics and like to see a mark neatly hit. 
If the curious reader wants to know 
what news of our life hereafter is vouch- 
safed by this revelation, the best answer is 
to exhort to patience and to be cautious 
in statement. "Myers" and "Hodgson" 
declare that they are very much more 
alive than they were on earth, that they 
are not really dreaming, that they would 
not desire to come back again, and that 
they are still, nevertheless, in possession 
of much at any rate of the memories and 
attachments of earth; they say that they 
are still almost as far as we are from the 



110 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

innermost Presence and Counsel of God, 
but they confirm the claims and sanctions 
of the religious life. They state that a 
period of unconsciousness, varying in 
length, supervenes upon death — a period 
unusually prolonged in Myers's case; and 
that after a few years — say half a dozen — 
the spirit moves in its development too 
far from earth life to have any further 
communication with it. Doubtless there 
are numerous exceptions to this ; and we 
gather that Myers himself is voluntarily 
staying near us for the sake of the service 
of our faith. 

After giving in full the whole context 
of the communications received and 
critically analyzing them, the report 
states that they are undoubtedly all con- 
fluent parts of the complex answer de- 
sired to the question of the Greek 
words. The report continues: 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 111 

"To sum up : In this concordant epi- 
sode of Mrs. Piper's trance and Mrs. 
Verrall's script the controlling influence 
in both cases claims to be one and the 
same personality, namely, Frederic 
Myers. To a question which could have 
been answered by Frederic Myers, this 
personality, Myers, gives various answers 
— all intelligent and all but one provably 
correct. Before Myers gives his first an- 
swer he shows knowledge of what his an- 
swer will be. Besides this, he shows that 
he knows that he had previously shown 
knowledge of his answer. One of the 
facts in his first answer cannot be proved 
to have been known to Frederic Myers, 
but there are good grounds for thinking 
that it might well have belonged to the 
great body of specialized and character- 
istic knowledge with which his mind was 
stocked. The facts involved in the re- 



112 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

mainder of the answer given by Myers 
were all known to Frederic Myers, and 
they emerged in a manner which indi- 
cates that the intelligence responsible for 
their emergence was as intimately con- 
versant with the closing chapters of 'Hu- 
man Personality' as Frederick Myers, its 
author, must have been." 

This summing up is, in effect, an ad- 
mission that the communicator could not 
have been other than the discarnate intel- 
ligence of Frederic Myers. 

THE LATIN MESSAGE 

The "Latin Message" incident was an- 
other remarkable test. A long Latin 
message was constructed and transmitted 
through Mrs. Piper. This message was 
worded in such an involved way that its 
translation was exceedingly difficult — 



Beyond the Borderline op Life 113 

even with the help of a dictionary — by a 
person possessed of only a small knowl- 
edge of Latin. The object was to pre- 
vent the normal consciousness of Mrs. 
Piper, who knows no Latin, from affect- 
ing the result, and partly to test whether 
the purported spirit of Myers could dis- 
play any of the knowledge of Latin that 
the corporeal Frederic Myers had pos- 
sessed. 

The substance of this long, intricate 
message was a hope expressed by the in- 
vestigators that Myers would go on with 
his scheme of cross-correspondences and 
would give definite replies by different 
mediums. As the last word of the first 
clause of the Latin message was given to 
Mrs. Piper — each word being spelt out, 
letter by letter — the clock struck 12. 
"At 12 o'clock on the same morning," the 
report states, "Mrs. Verrall at Cam- 



114 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

bridge sat down to write automatically, 
and the script then produced would form 
a most appropriate answer to the first 
clause of the first sentence of the Latin 
message." 

At a second sitting the second clause 
of the message was spelt out to Mrs. 
Piper, and at the identical time Mrs. 
Verrall at Cambridge wrote out auto- 
matically a reply which exactly corre- 
sponded. In answer to two more sections 
of the Latin message communicated 
through Mrs. Piper further exact replies 
came through Mrs. Verral. Precautions 
had been taken which made it absolutely 
certain that Mrs. Verrall could not have 
known of the nature or language of the 
questions. "This script of Mrs. Ver- 
rall's," says the report, "is undoubtedly 
in the style of Myers." 

An equally impressive test was that on 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 115 

April 17, when Mrs. Piper in London 
automatically wrote out the word Than- 
atos (Greek for death). When Mrs. 
Holland's script, written at Calcutta on 
April 16, 7:30 P.M. Calcutta time 
(1:30 P.M. Greenwich time), was re- 
ceived in London it was found to contain 
exactly the same word, a trifle misspelled. 
On the night of April 29 Mrs. Verrall 
wrote an automatic script which in vari- 
ous ways referred to death. Very as- 
tounding coincidences, surely. 



CHAPTER IV 

MATERIALIZATION AND LEVITATION 

IT is the phenomena of materialization 
and levitation which have most im- 
pressed the mass of scientists. Material- 
ization is the appearance of spirits in 
objective form, visible not only to the 
psychic but also to the non-psychic. 
Levitation in its strictest meaning is the 
raising or other movements of human 
bodies by supernormal agencies. It is 
often confused with telekinesis, which 
signifies the supernormal movements of 
inanimate objects such as tables, chairs, 
and the like. 

In materialization the resumption of 
the body or the appearance of the spirit 
116 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 117 

in human form is not always entire. On 
occasions the full figure is perceived; in 
most instances only fragmentary parts 
are seen, the head and the face, or a hand. 
By their nature materialization and levi- 
tation are susceptible of greater and 
more direct material proof than other 
phases of physic phenomena, such as, for 
example, clairvoyance. 

Although a modern term, the fact of 
materialization is by no means new. 
Curiously worthy of mention is the 
changed attitude of science towards the 
popular superstitions; more than one of 
these have been confirmed by scientific 
research. In his notable work, "Mira- 
cles and Modern Spiritualism," Alfred 
Russell Wallace deals with various au- 
thenticated cases of apparitions. Three 
persons driving along an English road- 
way saw a woman's figure in white float- 



118 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

ing above a hedge. If it was a halluci- 
nation of a subjective vision on their part, 
Wallace asks, how was it that the horse 
suddenly stopped and shook with fright? 
Dogs have often been known to cower 
in a state of pitiable terror when appar- 
ently no cause existed. Wallace narrates 
a number of instances. 

Crookes has written numerous ac- 
counts of phenomena which he investi- 
gated under strictly test conditions, with 
the most elaborate precautions against 
possible fraud. In his final extended re- 
port in 1874 t0 tne British Association 
for the Advancement of Science, of 
which he was president, he dealt at great 
length with the phenomena of materiali- 
zation and levitation. He gave a clas- 
sification of thirteen distinct varieties of 
materializations that he had seen and 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 119 

tested. Among these were luminous 
floating clouds, star-like points of light, 
the appearance of hands either self-lu- 
minous or observable by ordinary light, 
and the sight of phantom forms and 
faces. Many of these experiments took 
place in the presence of the mediums, 
Kate Fox, Florence Cook, the Rev. 
Stainton Moses, and that very extraor- 
dinary medium, D. D. Home. 

On one occasion, after Home had 
passed into a trance, Crookes tells, "a 
beautifully formed hand rose up from an 
opening in the dining table and gave me 
a flower . . . This occurred in the 
light in my own room while I was hold- 
ing the medium's hands and feet." 
Crookes frequently saw phantom hands, 
and sometimes forms and faces. At 
times these materializations were solid 



120 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

and life-like ; at other times they had the 
appearance of nebulous clouds con- 
densed into corporeal forms. 

The most startling of the many mate- 
rializations witnessed by Crookes were 
the repeated materializations of a spirit 
form whom Miss Cook called Katie 
King. "Three separate times," writes 
Crookes, "did I carefully examine Miss 
Cook crouching before me, to be sure 
that I held a living woman, and three 
separate times did I turn the lamp to 
Katie and examine her with steadfast 
scrutiny until I had no doubt of her ob- 
jective reality." 

All of these experiments with these 
various mediums were accompanied by 
levitations and telekinesis. It was only 
necessary, Crookes reported, for Katie 
Fox to place her hand on any substance 
and "instantly thuds would be heard like 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 121 

a triple pulsation." Crookes heard a 
great variety of sounds which he and his 
fellow-investigators declared could not 
have been produced by human causes. 
On one occasion a bell he had left in a 
room which he had carefully locked, 
came tinkling into the room in which he 
and Miss Fox were. How did it get 
there? It must have been transported 
through solid walls by invisible mind 
and power. No other explanation could 
be found. 

On another occasion at a sitting with 
Home other singular manifestations hap- 
pened. While Home was sitting a con- 
siderable distance away in a trance, 
Crookes' chair was twisted partly round 
and rose from the floor. A chair was 
seen by all present to move slowly up to 
the table from a far corner. A heavy 
dining table rose five feet from the floor. 



122 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

These and many other phenomena took 
place, according to Crookes, ^under spe- 
cially prearranged conditions which ren- 
dered trickery impossible." But the 
most astonishing phenomena was Home's 
levitation. Crookes notes at least a hun- 
dred instances, witnessed by a large as- 
semblage, of Home's rising in the air. 
One day when in a trance he floated 
upward, then through a window, out 
over an intervening space seventy feet 
from the ground, and then through 
another window which was opened by 
some unknown force. 

At about the same time, Alfred Russell 
Wallace was carrying on similar experi- 
ments, many of which he describes in his 
work on the subject. Likewise was 
Zollner, in Leipzic, with the American 
medium, Slade. Not to dwell upon the 
great number of phenomena witnessed 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 123 

by these scientists and the repeated in- 
stances brought to the world's attention 
by the British Society for Psychical Re- 
search, it is sufficient to say that from 
thence on for many years the fiercest 
controversy raged in the scientific world 
as to the reality of these phenomena. 
Charges of fraud and imposition were 
frequent; the "confession" extorted from 
Margaret Fox, when she was physically, 
mentally, and morally sunk in dissipa- 
tion, and no longer in a balanced condi- 
tion, was made much of. The attitude 
of the great majority of scientific men 
was one of thinly disguised prejudice 
and stubborn opposition. The slowly 
growing recognition of the facts has de- 
veloped into an almost unanimous con- 
viction. 



CHAPTER V 

EUSAPIA PALADINO 

IN Italy and France the investigation 
■* of psychic phenomena has taken on so 
great an impetus because the savants 
there have had unrestricted opportunities 
for studying the phenomena manifesting 
through those exceptional native me- 
diums, Eusapia Paladino and Amedee 
Zuccharini. Every one of the phenom- 
ena seen and recorded by Crookes, Wal- 
lace, Lodge, and Zollner has been again 
and again witnessed by several dozen of 
the most famous Italian and French 
scientists recently. 

Before referring to the Paladino man- 
ifestations a brief description of her will 

124 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 125 

be appropriate. She is now about fifty- 
five years old. Born in an Italian village 
of peasant parents, she was left an or- 
phan, and was taken care of by the vil- 
lagers. A fall she experienced when a 
year old left a depression in her head. 
This is the famous "hole," from which 
when she is in a state of trance a cold 
breeze is said to issue. Taken to Naples 
when a girl by a native of the village, she 
did household work, but was considered 
so incorrigibly lazy that she was turned 
out within a year. She was given shelter 
by a family at home. Friends called 
one night and in a spirit of jest began to 
speak of tables that danced and gave raps. 
Jokingly they proposed that the circle 
try it. The group had not been seated 
ten minutes before tables began to rise, 
chairs dance, curtains swell, glasses and 
bottles move about, and bells ring. 



126 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

This incident was the discovery of her 
mediumistic powers. Subsequently a 
saleswoman in Naples, she had to give 
up the work, so great were the scientific 
and lay demands upon her time, as soon 
as her mediumistic powers became 
known. She has given seances in Paris, 
Toulon, Milan, Naples, Genoa, St. 
Petersburg, Moscow, and many other 
cities. Invited to Paris by the Institute 
Psychologique, she was experimented 
upon by Camille Flammarion, Curie, the 
discoverer of radium; Richet, Janet, and 
other conspicuous French scientists. 
At Toulon, Lodge carried on a series 
of investigations. All of the assembled 
scientists at these experiments were 
deeply impressed. Curie, in particular, 
was astounded. 

"These experiments," commented 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 127 

Flammarion, on Curie's attitude, "were 
to him a new chapter of the great book 
of nature, and he was also convinced that 
there are hidden forces, to the investiga- 
tion of which it is not unscientific to de- 
vote oneself." 

The accounts of Morselli, Botazzi, 
Bozzano, and others of this group of 
scientists, deal, in sober, restrained, sci- 
entific terminology, with the many phe- 
nomena they observed. In his mono- 
graph just published "Eusapia Paladino 
and the Genuineness of Her Phenom- 
ena," Morselli groups the manifestations 
of materialization witnessed by him and 
his colleagues during thirty separate sit- 
tings into nine classes and thirty-nine 
varieties. At these seances, he says, 
touching, feeling, and grasping by in- 
visible hands form very common phe- 



128 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

nomena; the appearances are seen either 
in the dark, in a faint light, or a red 
light. 

"They are really human hands," he 
goes on, "which touch, press, grasp, pull, 
push, pat lightly, strike, pull the sitters' 
beards or hair, take off their spectacles, 
etc." Heads, arms, shoulders, and faces 
were frequently seen. This, it should be 
noted, is precisely the same set of phe- 
nomena noted long before by Wal- 
lace, Lodge, Crookes, and Zollner. Re- 
ferring to the phantom hands, Morselli 
says : "On grasping them we felt the im- 
pression of hands dissolving away, as 
though composed of semi-fluid sub- 
stance." Appearances of forms were 
very numerous. "These forms," Mor- 
selli relates, "advance toward the sitters, 
touch and feel them, embrace, grasp, 
draw them nearer or push them away, 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 129 

caress and kiss them, with all the move- 
ments of living and real persons." 

Levitations and telekinetic movements 
were also extremely frequent and strik- 
ing. Morselli says that he has felt oscil- 
lations and movements of the table with 
his own hands, and has also seen them 
hundreds of times. Of movements and 
beatings of the table, which could be in- 
terpreted into distinct messages, there 
were a great multitude. For instance, 
two blows by the unseen intelligences 
meant "no," and three "yes." Many 
times, Morselli, Botazzi, Foa, and their 
collaborators record, the table rose in the 
air and floated. This phenomenon was 
photographed a number of times. 

"Several times," says Morselli, "I was 
pulled violently on my chair back in the 
room. Sometimes we felt our chairs 
pulled from us." 



130 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

At one of the sittings a "barlock" 
typewriter weighing thirty pounds was 
transported by invisible hands from a 
little table in a far corner of the room 
and deposited on a large table in front of 
Morselli. 

One of the most amazing of the phe- 
nomena was the levitation of Eusapia 
Paladino together with her chair. The 
combined report of the assembled scien- 
tists says: "Suddenly Professors Mor- 
selli and Porro perceived that Eusapia 
had been raised, along with her chair, 
and carried up to a level above that of 
the surface of the table, upon which she 
redescended in such a way that her feet 
and the two front legs of the chair rested 
on the surface of the table, which was 
partially broken. Meanwhile the medi- 
um moaned as if intensely frightened and 
asked to be put back with her chair on 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 131 

the floor. But almost instantly she was 
carried up again with the chair, and this 
levitation lasted for some seconds, so 
that M. de Albertis and Professor Porro, 
without preconcerted arrangement and 
with completely simultaneous thought, 
succeeded in passing their hands under 
the feet of the medium and of the chair. 
Shortly afterwards, Eusapia, still seated 
redescended on to the table ; she was held 
by those to right and left of her; the 
chair was pushed or thrown down back- 
wards on the floor, and the medium, 
seized by several of those present, whilst 
still moaning, was carried to the floor 
and seated again in her place." 

Porro insists that the levitation was of 
such a nature that the result could not 
have possibly been brought about by 
artifice. "Eusapia," he says, "was ac- 
tually drawn up and sustained in a posi- 



132 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

tion absolutely contrary to static laws, by 
an invisible force, inexplicable in the 
present state of our knowledge of phys- 
ics." 

At another sitting held at the house of 
Count Verdun, in Turin, at which Foa, 
Mosso, Aggazoti, and other scientists 
were present, a seventeen-pound table 
rose in the air, floated, descended, and 
then, to the utter mystification of the be- 
holders was torn to pieces by invisible 
hands before their eyes. This took place 
in a strong red light; every movement 
could be followed. 

These are a very few of the hundreds 
of phenomena noted by the assembled 
scientists. At all of the sittings Eusapia 
Paladino's hands and feet were tightly 
held, and sometimes bound with strong 
cords. Specially devised scientific ap- 
paratus was also installed in the room 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 133 

to note any possible fraud. Morselli, 
regarding these phenomena, observes 
that they are the most marvelous of all 
mediumistic phenomena, because they 
seem to transcend the ordinary physical 
laws, and are therefore the most liable to 
suspicion, and require the greatest evi- 
dence for proof. The general public 
which hears them described and cannot 
see them in action, does not believe them. 
It looks upon them as gross frauds or 
illusions of judgment. 

"This was my state of mind for years," 
Morselli points out. "But now I am 
convinced that nearly all of these phe- 
nomena are genuine." 



CHAPTER VI 



MUNSTERBERG AND PALADINO 



AVERY remarkable example of the 
credulity of the incredulous is the 
universal acclaim with which the so- 
called expose of Eusapia Paladino by 
Professor Hugo Miinsterberg has been 
received. The publishers of this volume, 
being personally acquainted with Mr. 
Hereward Carrington, had doubts as to 
the accuracy of the report. They be- 
lieve, as Professor Miinsterberg stated in 
his article in The Metropolitan Mag- 
azine, that Mr. Carrington is an honest 
investigator and wrote to him for his ex- 
planation. Mr. Carrington had been 
sent to Italy by the British Society for 

134 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 135 

Psychical Research to investigate the so- 
called phenomena by Paladino. He is 
an expert prestidigitateur; he has been as- 
sociated with Professor Hyslop for some 
time in the investigation of psychical 
phenomena and he was well equipped for 
the task which he undertook. His ex- 
perience was such that he was forced to 
agree with the many other scientists who 
believe that the phenomena by Paladino 
cannot be explained by fraud. In order 
that American psychologists might have 
an opportunity to pass judgment on the 
phenomena he arranged with Paladino to 
come to the United States. It was his 
original intention to limit her audiences 
to scientific investigators of psychical 
phenomena. When Paladino landed, 
Mr. Carrington announced that if it were 
possible, he would keep her away from all 
newspaper men. The agents of the press, 



136 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

however, were very persistent in their 
hunt for her and he finally arranged to 
give a free seance before newspaper rep- 
resentatives. 

There was probably not a more indig- 
nant man in the world than Mr. Car- 
rington when Professor Miinsterberg's 
article appeared in the Metropolitan 
Magazine and he had every reason to be 
indignant. The last he had heard from 
Professor Miinsterberg was when the 
Professor had left the seance. He had 
been invited by Mr. Carrington to inves- 
tigate Paladino so that when the scientific 
series commenced he would have a knowl- 
edge of the facts to be investigated. In 
leaving, Professor Miinsterberg had ex- 
pressed himself as very much impressed 
with the phenomena; he made no men- 
tion of any fraud; on the contrary he 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 137 

said that he had a feeling of faintness 
which he gave as his reason for leaving. 
The publishers submitted these claims to 
Professor Munsterberg and advised him 
that they were about to publish them in 
this book. At the same time he was 
given the opportunity to reply. He 
thanked the publishers for the courtesy, 
but said that he had nothing to add to 
what he had already written. Those who 
are acquainted with all the facts in the 
case agree that Professor Munsterberg 
has said either too much or too little in 
this case, for his own reputation. 

If, as he stated, he believed Mr. Car- 
rington to be honest; if he believed that 
Mr. Carrington was really seeking for 
an honest explanation of the Paladino 
phenomena, then it would have been 
courteous to have apprised him of his 



138 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

suspicions rather than to sell them to a 
magazine in the form of a sensational 
article, unsupported by anything but 
Professor Munsterberg's own word and 
lacking consistency even in its own state- 
ments. That his statements are not con- 
sistent will, we think, be conceded by 
every reader of Mr. Carrington's 

REPLY TO PROFESSOR MUNSTERBERG 

It is probable that Professor Munster- 
berg's article in the February Metro- 
politan Magazine has proved to many 
thousands of persons in America that 
Eusapia Paladino is nothing more than 
a common fraud; that her trickery is 
now "exposed," and that all attempt at 
scientific investigation must, of course, 
be dropped immediately. Nothing of 
the sort, however, has occurred. If Prof. 
Munsterberg's article be examined in de- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 139 

tail, it will be found to be full of self- 
evident contradictions. 

( i ) Prof. Miinsterberg admits that he 
himself is incompetent to investigate a 
case of this character; yet he has under- 
taken to decide upon the case after two 
sittings, — when his scientific colleagues in 
Europe (after studying her for twenty 
years) have decided that the majority of 
the phenomena are genuine — and this not 
after a mere cursory examination, but 
after having thoroughly tested the 
medium with ingenious mechanical de- 
vices of all kinds. 

(2) Prof. Miinsterberg states that he 
believes Eusapia to be unconscious of the 
fraud she herself produces, yet, a little 
later on in his paper, he accuses her of 
having prepared an ingenious mechan- 
ical device, by means of which Eusapia 



140 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

could cause cold air to blow from a cer- 
tain point on her scalp, beneath her hair, 
etc. These two statements do not seem 
to agree. It is, of course, preposterous 
to suppose for a moment that such a con- 
trivance (including metal tubes running 
up her neck, beneath her hair, etc.) , could 
have been overlooked for years by in- 
vestigators who were always on the look- 
out for just such a contrivance. 

(3) Prof. Munsterberg adm La at the 
beginning of his article that he saV cer- 
tain movements of the table in full r Iight 
that he could not account for; yet, at its 
conclusion, he says that all Paladino's 
phenomena are fraud and trickery and 
nothing else. Again his statements do 
not seem to agree! 

(4) Prof. Munsterberg tells us that he 
has always been interested in abnormal 
psychology and in hysteria. In another 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 141 

place, he tells us that Eusapia presents 
evidences of hysteria and of a split per- 
sonality; yet finally he tells us that he will 
have nothing more to do with her. One 
would be tempted to ask, why? — since 
on his own showing this should be a case 
after his own heart. 

(5) As to the "foot grabbing inci- 
dent," this is really the only definite 
point made in Prof. Munsterberg's whole 
article $ d is due largely to an accident. 
Ear' r in the evening, Eusapia had asked 
her Sxtters whether they wished to tie her 
feet with rope, and they had replied that 
they aid not. If only this had been done, 
this famous incident would never have 
happened. Then what would have be- 
come of Prof. Munsterberg? If only 
Eusapia had been tied! But she was not, 
and the seance progressed. It is asserted 
that, at a certain moment, Eusapia's left 



142 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

foot was grasped by one of the sitters, 
lying upon the floor, partly within the 
cabinet, and hidden from Eusapia by the 
darkness, and by the cabinet curtain, 
which had blown out over him. 

Granting the strict accuracy of this ac- 
count, what has been proved? Probably 
that Eusapia attempted to produce phe- 
nomena fraudulently, with a free mem- 
ber. Every group of sitters in turn (our- 
selves included) knows very well that she 
will resort to such devices if she is al- 
lowed to do so; and Eusapia frequently 
says to her sitters, "Hold me tight, con- 
trol me well, for if you do not I shall 
probably attempt to produce phenomena 
myself in a more or less automatic man- 
ner." What could be fairer than this? 
Eusapia warns her sitters beforehand 
that she has this tendency to cheat in her 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 143 

trance-like condition, if she is not pre- 
vented from doing so. For the same 
reason, doubtless, she asked to be tied. 
It is quite possible, also, that Eusapia 
was merely kicking to and fro with her 
foot under her own chair, as she often 
does when distant phenomena are pro- 
duced, — sympathetic muscular twitch- 
ings which have often been observed 
when it was perfectly evident that there 
was no contact possible between the 
medium's body and the object moved. 

Further, the shorthand report of this 
seance shows us that, at the time this foot 
was grabbed, both Eusapia's knees were 
being held by the controller on the right, 
while Professor Miinsterberg himself 
was holding both her hands. This being 
so, I ask, how far can anyone under such 
circumstances, reach backward with 



144 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

either foot, without being detected or 
without displacing the knees that are be- 
ing held? 

Prof. Miinsterberg asserts that the 
touches upon his arm and side were pro- 
duced by the toes of Eusapia's left foot. 
He had not the audacity to say that they 
were produced by the medium's head — 
(which was perfectly visible) nor by her 
hands — both of which he himself was 
holding at the time ; nor by any mechan- 
ical contrivance; and his only recourse 
was to assert (without the slightest 
shadow of proof) that the touches were 
produced by the toes of her left foot. 
Apart from the difficulties presented by 
the fact that these touches were experi- 
enced when both Eusapia's knees were 
held under the table; apart from the fact 
that they have often been experienced 
when Eusapia's feet were tied with 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 145 

rope, to the floor, to her chair, or to the 
feet of her controllers; apart from the 
fact that it has often been sufficiently 
light to see that Eusapia did nothing of 
the kind; apart from the fact that Eu- 
sapia would have had to slip her foot 
out of her shoe, in order to produce these 
touches — while, as a matter of fact, her 
high laced shoe was not undone — there is 
this other trifling difficulty in accepting 
Prof. Munsterberg's explanation of the 
facts: that, a minute or two after this 
"foot grabbing" episode, Eusapia placed 
her left foot and leg across Prof. Muns- 
terberg's knees (as the stenographic 
record shows) and that under these con- 
ditions, Professor Miinsterberg was 
again touched on the left arm and side — 
he still holding both the medium's hands, 
and her head still being clearly visible. 
If anyone persists in believing, in face 



146 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

of this evidence, that Eusapia produced 
the touches in the manner postulated by 
Professor Munsterberg, there is, of 
course, nothing more to be said — except, 
perhaps, that we might, in common hon- 
esty, ask him to repeat the phenomena 
under the same conditions, or to find a 
contortionist who, with his right foot, 
can touch the side of a person sitting on 
his left, his knees being held beneath the 
table! 

Those who have attended seances with 
Eusapia Paladino will pay, of course, not 
the slightest attention to Professor Muns- 
terberg's article, or to the absurd sug- 
gestions which it contains, but it is that 
vast bulk of the American public who 
have 720/ attended seances, that will be in- 
fluenced by an article of this character. 
Popular sentiment being all on his side, 
it is impossible to offset the effects of such 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 147 

an attack by a mere counter-argument. 
One can but show that the explanations 
offered do not explain, and that the state- 
ments contained in the article do not 
agree with one another, or, in many cases, 
coincide with actual fact. Even if fraud 
were clearly proven on this occasion, 
what would have been established? 
Merely that Eusapia cheats whenever she 
can (which all her investigators have 
known all the time) and that this one 
phenomenon must consequently be dis- 
carded as evidence of any supernormal 
power. It does not in any way prove 
that the rest of her phenomena are fraud- 
ulent, or that the case must be rejected in 
toto — merely on the strength of this one 
fact. Let us examine the case as a whole 
— bearing in mind all the phenomena 
that have been presented, not only those 
occurring during her American visit, but 



148 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

those in the past; and when this has been 
done, I think that any fair-minded critic 
will realize that Professor Miinsterberg's 
so-called "expose" is far from being such 
in reality; that it presents evidence of no 
new form of trickery, and that the case is 
as far from being "explained away" or 
shown to be due to simple fraud as it has 
ever been. Indeed, the American sit- 
tings may be said to have added much to- 
wards proving the supernormal char- 
acter of these manifestations. This, I 
think, the evidence, when presented, will 
show. 

Here ward Carrington. 



CHAPTER VII 

BOTTAZZI'S EXPERIENCE WITH PALADINO 

PROFESSOR Filippo Bottazzi, Di- 
rector of the Institute of Physiology 
of the Royal University of Naples, in an 
article entitled "In the Unexplored Re- 
gions of Human Biology" in the Revista 
d'ltalia, gives a detailed account of 
seven seances with Eusapia Paladino. 
These took place in the laboratory of 
the Institute under the strictest scrutiny. 
None of Paladino's friends were present 
and she submitted herself to every de- 
mand of the investigators. Mechanical 
devices, located in the adjoining room 
and connected by electricity, recorded 
the pressing down of a telegraph key and 
the ticks of the instrument. Professor 

149 



150 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Bottazzi admits the existence of the phe- 
nomena but does not accept the spiritistic 
hypothesis as the explanation of the same. 
He thinks that the medium has the 
power of forming fluidic appended or 
arms which duplicate the movements of 
the medium's real arms. A translation 
of parts of two of the sittings is here 
given and also Professor Bottazzi's de- 
fense of those who believe in the reality 
of the Paladino phenomena. 

"Galeotti, Scarpa and I had agreed 
that at this sitting we must discover any 
fraud if there were any, and eliminate 
every doubt from our minds. On this 
account, we had placed all the objects in 
the cabinet within reach of Paladino's 
hands, and a lamp with which to illumi- 
nate the interior at the opportune mo- 
ment. Galeotti and I were in charge of 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 151 

the arms of the medium for almost the 
whole of the sitting and we were deter- 
mined that nothing should be substituted 
for them. Scarpa assumed the responsi- 
bility of leaving from time to time the 
ring of sitters to place himself at the 
point at which he thought he could exer- 
cise the greatest vigilance. I placed my- 
self at the left of Paladino (she is left- 
handed and works by preference with 
the left hand) and I did not separate my- 
self from her for one single instant. 
Galeotti was at the right. 

Towards the middle of the sitting, Pal- 
adino, as if she understood our sus- 
picions, called Scarpa near to her. He 
went, and placed himself between me and 
the medium and passed one arm around 
her back, redoubling in this way, the 
watchfulness on the left side, where there 
was the most danger of the hands being 



152 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

freed. The sitting began at nine o'clock 
precisely. Eusapia was in good humor. 
DeAmicis was a little late. He arrived 
almost at the moment when John King 
revealed his presence. We invited the 
table to salute the newcomer. Suddenly 
it began to move, rose up, struck blows 
upon the floor and moving up towards 
him, pushed him, with little courtesy 
backwards. 

THE MANDOLIN EPISODE 

The mandolin is at first touched and 
then strummed. Eusapia, seconding a 
request from DeAmicis, wishes to take it 
and put it upon the table and com- 
mences with her shoulder, with the arm 
and the left hand, to make a slight move- 
ment that I notice and follow diligently, 
similar to those which the same arm 
would have made had it been free and 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 153 

not able to really grasp the instrument, 
which was situated on the left side of her. 
In the meantime, Scarpa, coming close to 
me, placed himself directly behind the 
back of my chair and distinctly saw the 
mandolin rise, fall back again, rise again 
WITHOUT ANY HANDS TOUCHING IT, with 
light enough for us to discern every 
movement of Paladino's arms. Paladino 
said to me, bearing my right arm with 
her left towards the floor in the direction 
of the mandolin, 'Let us take it — 
help me,' and strove to grasp and raise 
it. 

In the meantime, the mandolin, cov- 
ered by the curtains, rose a little from the 
floor but fell down again, and Eusapia 
exclaimed in her dialect with visible 
anguish, 'It has passed away from me,' 
but the failure seemed to stimulate her. 
Again she attempted to raise it, but with- 



154« Beyond the Borderline of Life 

out success, and as it pained me to see 
her, I tried to persuade her to give up 
these vain attempts to place the instru- 
ment upon the table; but she seemed to 
be obsessed by this idea and continued to 
strive without paying any attention to me. 
It is absolutely necessary to have had 
Paladino's fingers in one's hand, as I had 
them that evening, to convince oneself 
how the rising and the falling of the man- 
dolin to the floor, the playing of the 
strings, etc., all are synchronous with the 
very delicate movements of her fingers, 
with the pulling and the pushing of the 
hand of the medium as if it were di- 
rected by a will conscious of the effect 
to be obtained. They were not irreg- 
ular, impulsive, disordered movements. 
They were precise and corresponded with 
those of a finger, or fingers ; identical with 
those which it is customary for one to 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 155 

make who wishes the strings to vibrate 
with precision and delicacy. There 
were two of us with the gaze fixed upon 
the mandolin, Scarpa and I, and we can 
affirm with certainty that the instrument, 
well lighted by the lamp above it, was 
not touched by the visible hands of Eusa- 
pia that were, at least, sixty centimeters 
from it, but that it moved by itself, as 
if by enchantment it had been furnished 
with organs of motion; and it seemed as 
we looked at it, as if it were the carcass 
of some monstrous reptile to which life 
had returned. It is impossible to de- 
scribe the impression made upon one w T ho 
sees an inanimate object move, AND MOVE 
NOT FOR A MOMENT ONLY, BUT FOR MANY 
MINUTES CONTINUOUSLY, move with- 
out anyone touching it, under the influ- 
ence of a mysterious force, while all is 
silence around, among the other immo- 



156 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

bile objects. Finally the mandolin is 
left in peace. Paladino was very much 
dissatisfied with it. I, no. Because the 
simple moving of the mandolin would 
have deprived us of the long and minute 
examination which we were able to make 
of the correspondence between the in- 
tentional movements of the medium and 
the movements of the objects upon which 
were applied her invisible power. 

sSi Hz. &l jfe ate jfc 

vp: t|v 7f? >*v vfr Tfr 

Eusapia opened my right hand and 
spread out the three middle fingers and 
pressing them down, and rubbing upon 
the table with the fleshy part underneath 
said to me in a low voice, 'How hard it 
is. What is it?' I did not understand, 
and she, 'There upon the chair; what is 
it?' 'It is chalk,' I hastened to reply, 
'Make an impression of the face.' 
'No,' she replied, 'it is hard; it is too 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 157 

hard; take it away.' 'Also the chair?' 
I asked. 'No, leave the chair.' Some- 
body left the chair for a moment to sat- 
isfy Eusapia's desire, looked upon the 
plate, and saw the impression of the three 
fingers. At a more accurate examina- 
tion made the following day, we saw that 
the three imprints seemed to be made 
by the sliding of the three fingers. 
Evidently this corresponded to the analo- 
gous moving of Paladino's left hand 
pressed upon my fingers upon the table. 
Now, Eusapia commenced to "work" 
upon the chair freed from the weight of 
the plate. She placed her left foot 
against my right, and the right against 
the left of Galeotti and made a pushing 
movement. The chair moved, came up 
to the table and began to rise. Behold it 
mounting up on the table with the back 
inclined towards the front, covered in 



158 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

part by the curtain; after many trials it 
mounted on top. We all exclaimed in 
chorus, 'Bravo, bravo!' Some one asked, 
'Shall we carry it away?' 'No, no,' 
replied Eusapia. 'Leave me the chair.' 
While the chair was upon the table, 
other phenomena happened which I 
will describe. At a certain movement, 
however, the chair began to move again, 
slid towards the angle of the table that 
was between me and Paladino and fell to 
the floor in the same direction, upon the 
mandolin., Later, Scarpa used it with- 
out objection from Paladino. It seemed 
as if she had forgotten it. It is singular, 
however, that suddenly after any object 
is borne upon the table, Eusapia is angry 
and seems to suffer if anyone touches it 
or tries to carry it away, as if it were a 
part of herself, or as if to the object, for a 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 159 

certain time, there adhered some part of 
her very sensitive body. 

THE ELECTRIC SWITCH 

But now the mediumistic appendici 
of Eusapia penetrate into the interior of 
the cabinet after exercising themselves 
upon the objects on the outside and com- 
mence the work which we hear, but 
which we cannot see. I beg all not 
to distract the medium with demands 
for touchings, apparitions, etc., but to 
concentrate their desire and will upon 
the things alone that I ask to have 
done. The medium throws away the 
trumpet, the brush, the ebony cane, which 
fall upon the floor, and which after being 
moved about are left in peace. The cord 
of the inside lamp which had fallen to 
the floor when the chair was borne upon 



160 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

the table, and was then hung upon the 
back of Galeotti's chair is now drawn 
from the interior of the cabinet and then 
thrown with the electric switch, violently 
upon the table. I hasten to beg that no 
one will touch it, but I do not explain 
that pressing it will light a lamp in the 
cabinet, something which is only known 
to Galeotti, Scarpa and myself. The 
electric switch is thrown upon the floor. 
Eusapia is in a state of extraordinary 
tension; she looks vacantly into space as 
if she were searching for something 
which she cannot find. Her attitude is 
that of one who, blindfolded, gropes with 
the hands into space to find the object for 
which one is looking. At a certain mo- 
ment, Eusapia takes the index finger of 
my right hand that has almost the same 
form as the electric switch, presses it with 
her finger and, behold, a ray of light 



Beyond the Borderline of Life l6l 

illumines the room from the inside of the 
mediumistic cabinet, and an exclamation 
of content escapes from the mouth of 
Eusapia. It is easier to imagine than to 
describe the astonishment of those who 
could not understand that which had 
happened. I exclaimed, 'Bravo, bravo! 
Do it again.' And the others, 'Bravo 
what? What do you mean?' 'What 
has she done?' And I explain that the 
electric switch thrown upon the table is 
connected with an electric lamp, placed 
high in the cabinet; that Eusapia, with 
one of her invisible hands has searched 
and then found the electric switch after 
having thrown it again away from the 
table, and has pressed with that hand, 
while with the finger of the visible hand 
she pressed my index finger and has thus 
turned on the light which has filled them 
with wonder." 



162 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

SEVENTH SITTING 

"In the usual room of the physiological 
library at 9 o'clock there were present, 
Professors Bottazzi, Galeotti and Scarpa, 
and beside Mrs. Bottazzi, Dr. Gaetano 
Jappelli, professor in charge of technical 
physiology in this university and coadju- 
tor in the Institute of Physiology, and 
Dr. Gennaro d'Errico, coadjutor in the 
same Institute. 

The mediumistic cabinet is the same as 
in the 7th sitting. 

Upon the table in the inside, are to be 
found, among other objects, a trumpet, a 
vase of flowers, a telegraph key, etc. 

In the room, a photographic camera is 
pointed at the mediumistic table, and a 
bag of magnesia is placed so that at a 
certain moment, touching an electric but- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 163 

ton will make red hot a platinum wire 
in the middle of the powder and produce 
a flash. 

We have photographed in this way 
two small risings of the table together 
with the people forming the chain. 

Two iron rings are fixed in the floor 
at the side of the two table legs nearest 
the medium; two very strong ribbons 
lead from the rings and above are wound 
around and sealed to Eusapia's wrist, 
each in a double knot. Upon each knot 
of the ribbons there is placed a lead seal, 
in the same way in which are sealed the 
cords of a sack or of the doors of a rail- 
road car. The sealing is done in the 
presence of all of us. The seal bears on 
one side, the letters M E, and on the 
other side, the word Napoli. Poor Eu- 
sapia allows herself to be tied like a 



164 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

criminal, not without protesting that she 
does it in honor of science, in the full 
security of her own honesty. 

We had arranged that the length of 
the ribbons should be such that in what- 
ever position her hands should be placed, 
they would never be able to reach any 
of the objects placed in the cabinet. 
Here is the distance measured before the 
commencement of the sitting: 

To the right of Paladino: 

Distance from the right ring to Eu- 
sapia's wrist m. 1.07. 

Distance from the right ring to the 
vase of flowers m. 1.47. 

Distance from the right ring to the 
trumpet m. 1.50. 

To the left: 

Distance from the left ring to Eu- 
sapia's wrist m. 1.20. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 165 

Distance from the left ring to the vase 
of flowers m. 1.89. 

Distance from the left ring to the 
trumpet m. 180. 

As can be seen, the objects on the right 
were distant not less than 40 centimeters 
(15.7 inches) and on the left they were 
farther still from Eusapia's hand. 

At the greatest stretching of the two 
ribbons, and of Eusapia's fingers, and in 
the most fatal position, the ringers alone 
of the right hand could just touch with 
the ends the edge of the inside table, 
which was securely fastened to the wall, 
and were distant at least 12 centimeters 
(4.7 inches) from the vase of flowers and 
the trumpet. The ribbons could not be 
stretched. No matter how much we 
tried, we could not stretch them any ap- 
preciable length. 



166 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

At the end of the sitting we all veri- 
fied before cutting the seals at each of 
Eusapia's wrists, that the knots and the 
four lead seals were intact. Japelli as- 
sured himself that the loops were so 
tight that it would not be possible to get 
the hands through them. Omitting to 
describe the carrying to the outside table 
of a bottle full of water, two chairs 
(twice, etc.), the many touchings, the 
rappings, the apparitions of hands, of 
colossal fists in the midst of us, I will 
record especially three phenomena that 
were, for us, the most important. 

i. The hands and feet of Eusapia 
(even though it was not necessary) were 
in the custody of, the left of Professor 
Japelli, the right of Mrs. Bottazzi, who 
from time to time testified to the position 
and the movements of the limbs of the 
medium. I was on the right of my wife. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 167 

Eusapia said to me, 'Extend your arm 
around the back of your wife.' I obey, 
and behold, I feel coming out from the 
curtain, the trumpet, which I recognize 
immediately by the touch. I grasp it 
and put it upon the table. 

2. Later, without any announcement, 
there was felt a friction of the curtain on 
the side corresponding to the right of 
Eusapia; the curtain is moved a little, 
while from the same side is advanced the 
vase of flowers. As the two custodians 
(Mrs. Bottazzi and Dr. d'Errico) have 
been ordered not to break the contact 
with the hands of Eusapia for any reason 
whatsoever, I myself, who am the one in 
the chain nearest to that point, extend 
my right hand and grasp the vase of 
flowers and put it upon the table without 
any water being spilled. 

The trumpet and the vase of flowers, 



168 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

as I have said, were at such a distance 
that the hands of Eusapia could not even 
touch them. The objects being at a dis- 
tance of 10 or 30 or 50 centimeters from 
the visible hand of the medium amounts 
to nothing. That which is of impor- 
tance is that it was absolutely impossible 
that she could reach them. 

3. Meanwhile, Galeotti, who had con- 
trol of Eusapia's right hand, distinctly 
saw the disappearance of her upper right 
arm. 

'Behold,' he said, 'I see two left 
arms, identically the same. The one 
arm is upon the table and is that of which 
Mrs. Bottazzi has hold of the hand. 
The other seems to sprout out from the 
shoulder; comes up to him, touches him 
and then returns to incorporate itself in 
Eusapia's body, disappearing. It is not 
an hallucination. I am awake. I am 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 169 

entirely conscious of two visible sensa- 
tions which I prove while Mrs. Bottazzi 
says that she is touched.' 

Some other objects, among them the 
telegraph key and a Marcy receiver, were 
not touched, although we have insisted 
strongly, but have not secured the 
graphic tracings ; but upon this, I should 
add a few words. 

LIMIT TO EUSAPIA'S POWERS 
Eusapia repeatedly said it was impos- 
sible to touch them, because they were 
placed too far away, which is true. 
Perhaps because of the intimacy in 
which she found herself with all present, 
she made confessions which she had 
never made before. I accent the pro- 
longation of her arms by means of which 
she touches, moves, and bears away the 
different objects and leave to be under- 



170 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

stood that these prolongations are more 
or less great, according as during the sit- 
ting, the "fluid" is more or less plentiful. 
That is that mysterious "mediumistic 
power" that she feels in herself and of 
which she is confusedly cognizant. 

At the end of the first sitting, I had an 
intuition that the sphere of action of the 
medium had certain limits outside of 
which any movable phenomena is im- 
possible, and that such limits vary. It 
may be said at the present time, that the 
objects which were distant more than 20 
or 30 or a few more centimeters from 
the extreme ends of Eusapia's limbs, 
could not be touched or moved by 
her. 

It seems that at one time her medium- 
istic power was much stronger, but, as I 
have said, these last few years it has be- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 171 

come weaker and, perhaps, it will not be 
long before it will be entirely spent. 

I know very well that in spite of the 
distance referred to by me, some of the 
more petulant will say: 

'See, Paladino took only the objects 
which were near her. Those farthest 
away she has not touched. Who knows 
but what she succeeded in some way in 
grasping the first in spite of the fasten- 
ings at her wrists. n 

But how? The bracelet made of ribbon 
around the right wrist was so tight as not 
to allow anything to be placed under it, 
at least the space was not more than a 
centimeter. This was proven before and 
after the sitting. We placed ourselves, 
one after the other, in the identical posi- 
tion of Eusapia and were able to con- 
vince ourselves that in the most favorable 



172 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

position of the wrists and of the fingers 
and allowing the ribbon the greatest pos- 
sible tension, we could not reach farther 
than the edge of the table. And besides 
it was not necessary only to touch the 
objects; to bear them towards us, it was 
necessary to grasp them. A large glass, 
full of water, is not borne away without 
spilling a drop of water, or a flower, with 
the ends of two fingers. This under- 
stood, the reasons alleged by Eusapia to 
justify her in the impossibility in which 
she found herself to touch the objects 
farthest away with her mediumistic ap- 
pended, ought not to be taken as a vulgar 
pretext, but they have the same value as 
those made by me in the determinism of 
mediumistic phenomena. 

Let us confess, then, that the results of 
this sitting have made a very favorable 
impression, because they have driven 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 173 

out the last trace of doubt or uncertainty 
in regard to the reality of said phenom- 
ena. The surety which we have acquired 
is of the same order as that which, daily, 
we acquire of the reality of the natural 
phenomena which we investigate, physi- 
cal, chemical or physiological. 

Now, to the incredulous, there only re- 
mains to accuse us ourselves of fraud 
and trickery. I should not be very much 
surprised if some, more bold and pre- 
tentious than the others, should dare to 
hurl such an accusation, but for that it 
would not disturb in the least the seren- 
ity of our minds." 



CHAPTER VIII 

BOTTAZZI'S DEFENCE OF PALADINO 

i 6TT is thoroughly unfortunate that in 
-1 this kind of phenomena the exposi- 
tion of observed facts cannot be simple, 
plain and objective, but that they inevita- 
bly must assume a polemic character or a 
personal one. The reason lies in the ex- 
traordinary character of the phenomena 
themselves, and in the fact that the human 
mind is more conservative than progres- 
sive, where every new idea, that differs 
too much from the ordinary, disturbs and 
provokes a reaction as much more strong 
as is extraordinary the idea that tries to 
penetrate and take root among others 
that do not recognize it either as a 
174 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 175 

brother or a sister. To this reaction, 
which certainly takes place among all 
those who see mediumistic phenomena, 
there is added in each observer, different 
ethical and sentimental motives, which 
contribute strongly to shape their opinion 
and judgment upon the same phenomena, 
to say nothing of their attitude towards 
other observers. In respect to medium- 
istic phenomena, the great majority of 
cultivated people is composed of those 
who have never seen anything. Medi- 
ums are much more scarce than tricksters 
and prestidigitateurs of all kinds, and 
they do not work upon the platform. 
For this reason, it is given to few to assist 
at real mediumistic sittings. Naturally, 
that contributes not a little to surround 
the phenomena with mystery and to place 
them in a sinister light; but this is not 
the fault of the medium. I should say 



176 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

that it was rather the fault of the best 
prestidigitateurs who undertake to pro- 
duce mediumistic phenomena if these be 
only tricks, vulgar tricks, as many peo- 
ple think. Is it possible that a presti- 
digitateur, who amazes thousands of peo- 
ple, is not capable of raising a table or 
making a chair move in a way to make 
people believe they rise up and walk of 
themselves. The truth is, that more than 
one has tried it, and more than one has 
been discovered in fraud; and on the 
other side, a famous, "honest" prestidigi- 
tateur, after having been present at "hon- 
est" mediumistic sittings, had to confess 
that he could not reproduce those phe- 
nomena. These, in fact, or at least some 
of them, are ordinarily different from 
those of the phenomena with which jug- 
glers entertain the public. What those 
"who have never seen" understand to be 



Beyond the Borderline op Life 177 

mediumistic phenomena is a matter of 
indifference. 

Those "that have seen" can then be 
divided into two groups; those who, 
from these sittings, bring away the belief 
that everything is trickery, vulgar trick- 
ery (this is a favorite expression, with a 
very strong accent upon the vulgar) , and 
they are the few. The others, and they 
are the many, are those who, not having 
been able to discover any fraud, in spite 
of the most rigorous vigilance, and being 
certain of having experienced during 
the sittings, real sensations (visible, audi- 
ble, tactile), and not illusion and hal- 
lucination, conclude simply that the said 
mediumistic phenomena are marvelous, 
worthy not only of consideration, but of 
study. 

Now, it is worth the trouble to investi- 
gate, how of two people, both estimable 



178 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

and cultivated, who assist at the same 
sittings and not at different ones, one ac- 
quires a conviction in one sense and the 
other in an opposite one. Let us see. 
If we were talking of different sittings, 
which is more than ordinarily the case, 
the question is more simple. Every bio- 
logical phenomenon has a complex de- 
terminism, and upon the manner of 
manifesting itself, influences not alone 
the exterior conditions, but besides and 
above all the interior condition of the 
living organism. Now, it is impossible 
that these conditions should be identical 
in every experiment. Furthermore, it is 
impossible even to obtain identical re- 
sults from experiments which seem to 
have been made under the same condi- 
tions. Let us take one example. You 
stimulate with an electric current the 
vago nerve and observe the function of 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 179 

the heart, an organ which, for the regu- 
larity of its workings, has the most re- 
semblance to the regularity of a machine. 
The normal effect of the stimulation is 
the arrest of the cardiac movements, but 
the cases are not rare, in which only 
rarity of beating is obtained, or the 
diminution of the force of each beat 
without arrest, and in whichever case, 
after stimulating the nerve, the heart 
which beats weakly or slowly, or does 
not beat at all, returns in a little while 
to beat rhythmically. One who assisted 
at a similar experiment, and is ignorant 
of physiology, should he read in a treat- 
ise on this subject under the chapter "En- 
ervation of the Heart," that the stimula- 
tion of the vago nerve arrested the heart 
in its dilation, would he not say of it, 
'It is not true; the heart does not stop 
in that way'? But the physiologist who 



180 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

has seen the heart stop one hundred times 
to five times where it did not stop, 
smiles at such remark. He knows by 
previous observations that the different 
effects depend upon the different condi- 
tions in which the heart or the nerve may 
be found. 

Thus it is with the principal medium- 
istic phenomena, and particularly we 
wish to say it of that produced by Eu- 
sapia Paladino. Poor Eusapia is not a 
machine, but a living organism. In 
hundreds of mediumistic sittings, at 
which people worthy of trust have been 
present, she has produced phenomena of 
such a character as not to leave any doubt 
of the importance and reality of the same 
or of her honesty. On the other hand, 
in a few sittings, the phenomena have 
been few, weak, and such, in short, as to 
leave the observers unsatisfied, who be- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 181 

cause of this have been erroneously led 
to suppose that even those seen by others 
may have been of the same strength and 
nature and that they have been exagger- 
ated by human credulity and simplicity; 
from this to denouncing as fraud and 
to calling Paladino a fraud and a trick- 
ster, is a short distance. To affirm 
that, it is necessary to have discovered 
fraud." 

FRAUD BY PALADINO 

"Has Paladino, then, ever been discov- 
ered in fraud? It seems that she has. 
Leaving on one side unconscious trick- 
ery, it seems, however, that the only 
intentional conscious trickery to which 
Eusapia foolishly had resource more 
than once has been to make an object 
move in full light by means of one of her 
hairs. If she had been so rascally as is 



182 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

said, she certainly would not do these 
things. She has been reproved by Flam- 
marion and by others, but her intelli- 
gence is so low that she continues, it 
seems, to divert herself still with the 
famous hair, trying, I believe, to deceive 
someone who she feels is not in sympa- 
thy with her, rather than to deceive in 
the hope of making a trick pass for the 
true thing. I believe also in another 
possibility. There are sittings during 
which, or part of which, Eusapia does 
not succeed in producing any phenomena, 
and this, for me, is one of the best proofs 
of the reality of mediumistic phenomena, 
when these have taken place; and these 
cases, it seems, occur oftener now that 
she begins to get old and to become 
weaker. Who of us can assert that 
every day we are equally disposed or apt 
to work with the same energy and effi- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 183 

cacy? But when she finds herself in 
such a condition, she ought to refuse to 
give sittings, one may say. True. But 
it is necessary to consider that she often 
finds herself in somebody else's house, 
where she has been called to "work"; 
that often, persons who come from distant 
places are there to see; persons, let us say 
it, as inexorable as the spectators at a 
theatre who, strong in the right which 
comes to them from having paid, wait 
anxiously to see and to hear. Persons, 
moreover, whom we are obliged to send 
away unsatisfied, complaining and hurl- 
ing insults like those of which we have 
spoken before. Who will refuse to ad- 
mit that Paladino under such conditions, 
anxious to satisfy as much as she can, the 
hopes of those persons, sometimes gives 
in to the temptation to commit a fraud; 
to give as mediumistic phenomena, 



184* Beyond the Borderline of Life 

others produced as best she can with her 
hands or with her feet. In our seven 
sittings we have never noticed one thing 
of this kind. Eusapia has never made 
use of expedients of any kind in order to 
deceive. On the contrary, she has never 
omitted to advise us every time that she 
moved the table or the curtain with her 
visible hands ; but it is absolutely impos- 
sible to deny that under the conditions 
given above she may have committed or 
does commit some little fraud, uncon- 
scious of the incalculable harm that is 
done her reputation and the true medi- 
umistic phenomena, in the estimation of 
the immense majority of people who, not 
being present at the sittings, have to trust 
to the faithful narration of those who 
have been present, in order to form any 
conviction whatever. 

And even that is the consequence 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 185 

partly of her slight intellectual develop- 
ment, and partly because of the igno- 
rance in which, necessarily, she remains 
of the impression made by the notices to 
the public in regard to fraud (because 
she does not read), nor of the smile with 
which some speak in her presence of 
mediumistic phenomena. However that 
may be, it is highly unjust to deny the 
reality of mediumistic phenomena, bas- 
ing the denial upon the few cases in 
which the ingenuous and small frauds of 
Paladino have been observed, and not to 
take into consideration the great frauds 
of the tricksters by profession who, dis- 
covered once in their tricks, have been 
obliged to immediately disappear." 

MAL-OBSERVATION 

"He who has observed badly, many 
times is in a disadvantageous condition. 



186 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Worse still, if he has come to look on 
with a prejudice that he is going to as- 
sist at trickery, which is the same as to 
say with an opinion already formed. 
Worse still, if he has come with the 
impudent intention of having the right, 
thinking he only has seen, to call others 
imbeciles who do not believe that they 
have been tricked, believing also, to put 
in relief his own superiority as an ob- 
server and critic. All those, and others 
who, in denying, are influenced by mo- 
tives still less noble, will not have the 
power to diminish the value of the now 
numerous contrary affirmations of per- 
sons who respond to the names of 
Crookes, Ramsay, Lodge, Lombroso, 
Richet, Flammarion, Luciani, Morselli. 
That is to say, of honest scientists whose 
fame cannot be shaken by the loud laugh- 
ter of the few who seem to think nega- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 187 

tion a sign of mental superiority. To 
those, then, who deny without having 
seen, affirming a priori the phenomena, to 
be impossible, we must reply, first see 
and then we will discuss with you. 

Worthy of respect are those, and they 
are not few, who refuse to see because 
they fear that the things observed may 
disturb them in their naturalistic convic- 
tions and the mechanical understanding 
of the world, which with fatiguing study 
and long meditation they have succeeded 
in forming. I do not share their fears, 
because the phenomena seen by me have 
not disturbed me in the least, nor shaken 
any of my naturalistic convictions. The 
new knowledge has been added to the 
old, and even if it is not strictly welded 
to it, at least, it has had the effect of 
confirming in my mind the sentence of 
Leonardo, that 'nature has many laws of 



188 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

which we have no knowledge'; but, in 
fine, those people merit as much respect as 
those believers who refuse to recognize 
the principle of natural science, for fear 
that they may be disturbed or shaken in 
their religious faith. 

But for the others, for that small num- 
ber of ostentatious persons who pretend 
with their few and unsuccessful observa- 
tions, to annul the many, the very many 
observations made under different and 
often better conditions, by persons not 
inferior to them (and often superior) in 
acuteness of wit, in experimental capac- 
ity and in solidity of character, which 
is amply proven by the results of 
their life; to those around whom read- 
ily flock the ignorant and pretentious, 
for the same reasons, that the praise 
of the throng is given to him who 
destroys rather than to him who builds; 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 189 

to him who trims up old motives, rather 
than to the innovator. For them, I, if 
it were worth the trouble, would be in- 
exorable. I content myself in saying to 
them: 'In what things are your senses 
superior to ours? What proof have you 
given of superiority of critical power? 
From what do you derive your convic- 
tions, that you alone, the few, have seen 
well, and that we, the many, have always 
been fooled; that we have never known 
how to discover the fraud? Is it simply 
your conviction? Then, our conviction 
is worth at least as much as yours, with 
the difference to our advantage that from 
our written reports, results the evidence 
that our observations were made under 
the best experimental conditions that can 
be imagined, and with another which 
consists in the greater number of our ob- 
servations.' " 



190 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

"These people do nothing but repeat, 
'All is fraud and trickery'; but invited 
to say why they have come to such con- 
clusions, to tell what measures they have 
taken to discover fraud, and how the 
medium has tricked them, behold! We 
are no farther advanced, and we hear 
them repeat the customary foolishness, 
that they had a net intuition of the fraud, 
even though they cannot explain exactly 
what measures the medium took to com- 
mit fraud; even as they do not know the 
arts of the prestidigitateurs of which, 
nevertheless, they have not the least 
doubt. 

That the medium skillfully got her 
hands away from the custodians and 
worked with incredible skill and rapid- 
ity. Then those in charge of her hands, 
and all the others present at the sitting 
must have been in a dream to such an ex- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 191 

tent that they were unconscious of every- 
thing. That the medium has mechanism 
hidden under her clothing; that she lifts 
up the table, propping up one leg of this 
by placing her own foot under it and mak- 
ing it rise with her hands, arms, etc. 

These are things which might have 
been said some twenty or thirty years 
ago ; not now, that observations of medi- 
umistic phenomena are many times 
multiplied and refined. 

But, how could she release her hands 
if they were, without interruption, in 
contact with mine? Release the other 
hand which is not in contact with mine, 
and of which I can know nothing. But 
admitted even this, how would it be pos- 
sible for the medium to move objects, 
situated on the side where I am, for ex- 
ample, upon the chair upon which I am 
seated and where the other hand abso- 



192 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

lutely could not reach? And then why 
ought I not to see the arm or operating 
hand of the medium, while I can dis- 
tinctly see the arms and hands of all the 
others present, even those who are far- 
thest away from me? Eusapia's arms 
are not diaphanous. When they move, 
I see them, I follow them with my look. 
I see her hands that touch the curtain, 
that touch her head and my own. Why 
should I not also see them when they bear 
a bottle or a glass upon the table and 
when they are insinuated into the cabinet? 
Work with the legs and with the feet! 
But how, when her legs are stretched 
under my knees and her feet are propped 
against Jona's knees, or are held by 
Scarpa under the table? How can these 
feet bring out of the cabinet a table or 
a chair? How does Eusapia, poor, 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 193 

small and ill, drag along the floor for 
30 or 40 centimeters my body, which 
weighs 90 kilograms, with the chair upon 
which I am seated, making use in every 
case of only one arm, the left, because 
she would not have been able in any way 
to make her right hand reach to the back 
of my chair? 

Very rapid movements, so that we 
could not notice them! But some of the 
phenomena lasted minutes entire, and 
our eyes were fixed upon the moving ob- 
ject. How is it possible to admit that 
no one noticed Eusapia's arm, if it 
moved, as it went from the object moved 
to the hands of the custodians and vice 
versa? 

Hidden mechanism? But where and 
what kind? Scarpa and I had held our 
right arm around Eusapia's back for a 



194 Beyond the Borderline op Life 

long time, while behind her back, in the 
mediumistic cabinet, was taking place, 
this or that phenomena. 

We have not seen anything nor felt 
anything. We have seen the table be- 
tween us rise a half meter from the floor 
without anyone touching it. Where are 
the props? Paladino was standing up 
with us with her hands in the chain. 
Were we blind? 

Dreaming? But we did nothing but 
whisper, even too much; we laughed, we 
spoke and joked with Galeotti ; we spoke 
with Eusapia. We got up ; we sat down 
again, etc. Are these conditions under 
which phenomena take place — the phe- 
nomena of illusion and hallucination? 
He errs, who, never having assisted at a 
spiritualistic sitting, has been led to be- 
lieve that everybody is motionless, silent 
and astounded, as if "the dream incubus 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 195 

were upon them." Galeotti says that 
spiritualistic sittings are the most divert- 
ing things in the world, and he is right. 

And, besides, mediumistic phenomena 
are not of one kind only; they are not 
exclusively phenomena of movement. 
If, for the first, there may be doubt as 
to trickery, for the other kind there can 
be no doubt. How could the medium 
produce that shining flame which seems 
to rise from her head, and then is seen 
moving slowly through space and lasts 
long enough to be seen by all, in what- 
ever position they may find themselves? 
And those apparitions of fists and of co- 
lossal hands or heads at such a height 
that not even the tallest of us could touch 
them. And another phenomenon abso- 
lutely excludes the idea of fraud, not- 
withstanding that this may be of ordinary 
movement. That is the synchronism of 



196 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

the mediumistic phenomena with the 
muscular movements of the medium; a 
synchronism upon which I have re- 
peatedly insisted in this article, and that 
Mr. B. assures me that Signor DeRochas 
has already noted in his book, before 
Barzini took notice of it. Of this syn- 
chronism of movement, we believe we 
have succeeded in giving a graphic and 
irrefragable demonstration in regard to 
the beatings of the two electric keys ; but 
this was proven by us in many other 
movements that could not be registered 
skillfully. When Scarpa had Paladino's 
feet in his hands, he always felt her legs 
move in time with the movements made 
by the table or chair. 

Often Eusapia has her two hands in 
chain with the two custodians. Not 
upon the table, but upon her hips, and 
then her fingers are felt in continuous 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 197 

movement, while from the cabinet the 
telegraph key is heard to tick, the liquid 
of one bottle is emptied into another, or 
some object is taken and brought outside. 
Now, when I experience simultaneously 
tactile sensation upon my hand, and 
acoustic or visible sensation at a distance, 
how can there be any doubt in my mind 
that the distant phenomena are operated 
by the same fingers that I feel in my 
hand. Not only fraud, but illusion and 
hallucination even on my part, can be 
excluded in such cases absolutely. Some- 
times it pleases Eusapia to release one of 
her hands from mine and I do not oppose 
it. She raises it and touches, for ex- 
ample, the curtains, but I follow it with 
my glance. I do not lose it for one in- 
stant from my view, and I see that it 
never penetrates in the cabinet and never 
goes beyond the limits of the curtains. 



198 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

If, at the same time, in the cabinet, a 
telegraph key is touched, or I feel a 
touch on my breast or my ankle bone, or 
if a hand appears a long distance away 
from me and from Paladino, how can I 
believe that the hand which I see in- 
cessantly is the same that touches me, 
that closes the key or appears at a dis- 
tance? 

In our sittings there was neither fraud 
nor trickery. That I can affirm with se- 
curity, solemnly, in the name of all the 
others present. Different by the order 
of the studies that they cultivated, by tem- 
perament (what greater difference could 
there be in temperament than between 
Lombardi and Scarpa; Jona and Gale- 
otti, Galeotti and me) ? Because of the 
region in which we had been born (there 
were representatives from Venice, from 
Piedmont, from Tuscany, from Umbria, 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 199 

from the Abruzzi and from the Puglie; 
not one Neapolitan) and by reason of 
age. And all of us are of accord in the 
conviction that the phenomena observed 
by us were never produced by fraudulent 
means, but were real phenomena." 

ZUCCHARINI PHENOMENA 

Equally startling in some respects have 
been the recent experiments in levitation 
with Zuccharini. Employed in a muni- 
cipal office, Zuccharini was unaware of 
his psychic powers until out of curiosity 
he went as a spectator to a seance. He 
fell into a trance and manifested various 
phenomena. 

Only a mere fact or two can be noted 
here of the multifarious phenomena ob- 
served during nine sittings in Milan by 
Murani, Patrizi, Bianchi, and others. 
At one of the sittings, after his falling 



200 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

into a trance, movements of the table and 
the appearance of luminous phenomena 
were observed as usual. Then Zuccha- 
rini (he weighs 147 pounds) was uplifted 
by an invisible force on to the table. He 
rose in the air gradually, "and," Murani 
reports, "the medium's body remained 
poised in space for a period of from ten 
to twelve seconds." This levitation was 
afterward repeated many times. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE PIPER HODGSON-CONTROL 

THE following extracts from the re- 
port of Professor William James 
on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson-Control are 
taken from the Proceedings of the So- 
ciety for Psychical Research published 
in June, 1909. They are inserted to give 
the reader an idea of some of the start- 
ling communications received through 
Mrs. Piper and how they are regarded 
by one of the most conservative investi- 
gators. 

"Miss M. Bergman, [pseudonym], had 

been in previous years an excellent sitter, 

and was known by name to Mrs. Piper. 

She dwelt in another state, and her social 

201 



202 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

connections were not in Massachusetts. 
At her first visit, December 31st, 1907, 
the communications were in writing and 
she had much difficulty in deciphering 
them. At the second sitting, January 
1 st, 1908, the voice was used and things 
ran much more smoothly. 

At the first sitting R. H. quickly ap- 
peared, spoke of having seen two brothers 
of the sitter in the spirit-world (names 
known to trance-personalities, and non- 
evidential), made a wrong statement 
about Christmas at the cemetery, and 
then, being asked to recall his meetings 
with Miss Bergman on earth, said: 

I will. Do you remember one even- 
ing when I came to the hotel 
where you were staying and I sat 
and told you of my experiences till 
it got very late and I asked you 
if you would not [illegible] I told 
you so very many jokes, you and 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 203 

Miss Pope were convulsed with 
laughter over it. [Correct, Ho- 
tel Bellevue, Boston, March, 
1905. — M. B.] 

After a while, Hodgson reappears, say- 
ing: 

Do you remember my telling you 
about my German friends ? 
Miss B. No. 

Perhaps Miss Pope remembers. 

[I found later that Miss Pope well 
remembered Dr. Hodgson's tell- 
ing about his "German friends" 
and that it was that which "con- 
vulsed us with laughter" the even- 
ing he had stayed so late when 
calling at our hotel. At this 
point I had become so discour- 
aged by the great difficulty of 
reading the writing and the con- 
fusion in making things clear that 
I felt very indifferent and inert in 
mind.— M. B.] 

Bosh. 



204 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Miss B. What do you mean by that? 

You understand well. 
MissB. Bosh? 

Yes, I say bosh. BOSH BOSH 
Miss B. What do you mean by that? 

Oh I say it is all bosh. 
Miss B. What is bosh? 

Why the way you understand. It 
is simply awful. 
Miss B. That sounds like you, Dr. Hodgson. 

I could shake you. 
Miss B. How can I do better? 

Put all your wits to it, you have 
plenty of them. 
Miss B. I will do my best. Go on. 

Do. Do you remember I used to 
chaff you. 
Miss B. Indeed I do. 

Well I am still chaffing you a bit just 
for recognition. 
Miss B. It helps. 

Amen. Now you are waking up a 
bit. 
Miss B. I am. 

Capital. So am I. Don't you re- 
member I told you I would show 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 205 

you how to manage if I ever came 
over before you did. 
Miss B. Indeed I do. [Sitter had often 
heard Dr. Hodgson say this.] 1 
Well now I am trying to show you. 
I used to scold you right and left 
and I shall have to keep it up, I 
think, unless you do better. 
Miss B. I deserve it. 

If you do not who does? 
Miss B. You are your old self. 

Oh I am the [two words not de- 
ciphered] I was. You'll find it 
out before I finish. 
Miss B. Have you a message for Theo [Miss 
Theodate Pope] ? 
Yes indeed give her my love and tell 
her I am not going to forsake her. 
I do not think she has been keep- 
ing straight to the mark. 
Miss B. What do you mean by that? 

I think she has been getting a little 
mixed up in her thoughts and 
ideas of us over here. I am the 

1 The bracketed comments in the third person are by 
Miss Bergman herself. 



206 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

same old sixpence and I wish she 
were the same. I want to see her 
very much. 
["Theo" had had no sitting for a 
long time, her interest being les- 
sened by the circumstance that 
records of several sittings had not 
been kept systematically, as before 
Dr. Hodgson's death. At this 
point the hand wrote comments 
relating to circumstances which 
had arisen in Theo's life since Dr. 
Hodgson's death. These com- 
ments were singularly appropri- 
ate.— M. B.] 

At the second sitting, when R. H. ap- 
peared, the voice began speaking very 
rapidly and heartily. 

Well, well, well, this is Miss Berg- 
man ; hullo ! I felt as though I 
could shake you yesterday. 
Miss B. Well, I was pretty stupid. I think 
we can do better to-day. Please 
repeat some of the messages you 






Beyond the Borderline of Life 207 

wrote and left sealed to be opened 
after your death. 

One message I gave to Will. If I 
remember correctly it was "there 
is no death." 
Miss B. Who is Will? 

Will James. 
Miss B. Are you sure you are now giving this 
quotation correctly as you wrote 
it? 

Of course I am. [There followed 
an outburst spoken so rapidly that 
the sitter could not get it down, 
declaring that the speaker had not 
lost his memory any more than 
had the sitter, etc.] 
Miss B. Did you leave other messages? 

Yes, another. "Out of life" — how 
did I quote it — "Out of life, into 
life eternal." ... I know 
positively what I wrote. I have 
promised Piddington to repeat 
through Mrs. Verrall all the mes- 
sages that I give through this 
light. Every message given at 
this light must be repeated 



208 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

through Mrs. Verrall before any 
one opens any of my sealed mes- 
sages. Mrs. Verrall is the clear- 
est light except this which I have 
found. Moreover she has a 
beautiful character and is per- 
fectly honest. That is saying a 
great deal. [The reader will no- 
tice that Mrs. Piper had been in 
England and returned, at the date 
of the sittings with Miss Berg- 
man. — W. J.] Do you remem- 
ber my description of luminiferous 
ether, and of my conception of 
what this life was like? I have 
found it was not an erroneous 
imagination. 
[The above words were spoken with 
great animation and interest. 
The sitter, although remembering 
Dr. Hodgson's description of 
"luminiferous ether," felt that she 
was not qualified to enter into a 
conversation of this character and 
began to say something else. 
The voice interrupted her:] 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 209 

It is never the way to get the best 
results by peppering with ques- 
tions. Intelligences come with 
minds filled and questions often 
put everything out of their 
thought. I am now going to 
give you a test. Mention it to no 
one, not even to Theo. Write 
down, seal and give to Alice or to 
William. 

[Directions here followed regarding 
such a test. After these direc- 
tions the voice spontaneously took 
up another subject.] 

Your school was — [correct name 
given], was it not? [Already 
known to controls, but probably 
not to Mrs. Piper when awake.] 
You are changing, your brother 
tells me, and he is very pleased. 
He thinks you are going to 
broaden out and do a better work. 
He is very glad. Do not under- 
take too much. Make use of as- 
sistance in the work. 



210 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Miss B. Where were your lodgings in Bos- 
ton? 
Well, now, that has brought back to 
my mind Boston — . Certainly — 
there were some doctors in my 
building — George Street — no — 
not George — Charles Street — I — 
I believe. Now let me see, 
Charles Street. Up three flights, 
I think I was on the top. [Cor- 
rect, but known to Mrs. Piper. — 
W.J.] 

Miss B. Do you know when I was at your 
lodgings ? 
You were there? Didn't we have 
tea together? [False.] 

Miss B. No. 

Did you come and read papers? 

Miss B. No. 

Did you go there after I passed out? 

Miss B. Yes. I went to get some articles be- 
longing to you, and did them up 
in rubber cloth. 
Capital, that is good. Lodge and 
Piddington consider it good when 
I can't remember what did not 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 211 

happen ! What was the name of 
that girl who used to work in my 
office? 
Miss B. I do not remember. 

Edmund — Edwards — I am thinking 
of her going to my rooms to read 
papers. [Her name was Ed- 
munds, known to the medium. — 
W.J.] 

Now I want to ask you if you re- 
member Australia, remember my 
riding horseback? Remember my 
telling you of riding through the 
park in the early morning with 
the dew on the grass and how 
beautiful it was. 
Miss B. Yes, yes, I remember that very well. 
That is fine. 

I am Richard Hodgson. / am he. 
I am telling you what I remember. 
I told you, too, about my preach- 
ing. I believed I was in the 
wrong and I stopped. It hurt 
some of my people to have me. 
Miss B. Tell me about your riding. 

I remember telling you about my 






212 Beyond the Borderline of Life 



dismounting and sitting and 
drinking in the beauty of the 
morning. 
Miss B. Tell me any experiences that befell 
you while riding. 
Oh, I told you about the experience 
with the fiery horse. You remem- 
ber he dismounted me. It was 
the first experience I had in see- 
ing stars. I lost consciousness. 
I experienced passing into this 
life. I remember my being un- 
conscious and recovering con- 
sciousness. I remember telling 
you this at the hotel. 
[Sitter's mind was filled here with 
recollections of how Dr. Hodg- 
son had once told her all this when 
talking with her at the Parker 
House in Boston, in 1904. He 
had related just this experience 
and had said that when he recov- 
ered consciousness after being un- 
conscious for some time, it seemed 
to him he had been in a spiritual 
universe. He also told her at 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 213 

that time of his having given tes- 
timony in Methodist meeting as a 
a lad in his teens, and afterwards 
giving it up because he became 
skeptical in matters of faith. 
This, he said, had troubled some 
of his kinsfolk.— M. B.] 
Miss B. What did you use to order for lunch- 
eon when you lunched with us at 
the hotel? 

Oh, I have forgotten all about eating 
— m — m — I was very fond of 
protose. 

[The sitter did not have "protose" 
in mind, but remembers Dr. 
Hodgson sometimes asking the 
waiter for one of the prepared 
breakfast foods, but does not re- 
call its name. — M. B.] 

When I found the light it looked 
like a tremendous window, open 
window. The canopy — do you 
remember how they used to talk 
about the canopy? It is an ethe- 
real veil. If your spiritual eyes 
were open you could see through 



214 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

this veil and see me here talking 
to you perfectly. 

[The sitter did not care to talk 
about this, although she remem- 
bered perfectly Dr. Hodgson's 
telling her "how they talked 
about the canopy," so she asked a 
question, referring to the intimate 
personal affairs of one of her 
friends. The replies showed a 
strange knowledge of the circum- 
stances known only to the sitter 
and her friend, and were entirely 
a propos. The voice then went 
on speaking, and burst out with 
what follows, in a tone of mingled 
indignation and amusement:] 

Will thinks I ought to walk into the 
room bodily and shake hands with 
him. I heard him say "Hodgson 
isn't so much of a power on the 
other side." What does he think 
a man in the ethereal body is go- 
ing to do with a man in the phys- 
ical body? [Seems to show some 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 215 

supernormal knowledge of the 
state of my mind. — W. J.] 
Miss B. To whom did you speak first from 
that world? 
Theodate, yes, Theodate, she was 
the one to whom I first spoke. 
[Correct.] 
[The sitter now asked to talk with 
another spirit, and reply was made 
that R. H. would continue talk- 
ing until he came. R. H. did 
this by again referring to the ac- 
cident in the park. He spoke of 
being seated when he first told us 
of the incident, and of getting up 
and walking around the room as 
he talked. He said it chanced 
that this incident had been told to 
few people, and again dwelt upon 
having seen stars after falling, 
having been unconscious, having 
had visions while unconscious, as 
if the spirit had left the body and 
passed into another world. All 
of this corresponded exactly with 
fact. Dr. Hodgson had com- 



216 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

menced the story seated, and had 
risen and walked about as he 
talked.— M. B.] 

The accurate knowledge thus displayed 
of R, H.'s conversations at the hotels in 
Boston where the ladies stayed, seems to 
me one of the most evidential items in the 
whole series. It is improbable that such 
unimportant conversations should have 
been reported by the living R. H. to Mrs. 
Piper, either awake or when in trance 
with other sitters; and to my mind the 
only plausible explanation is supernor- 
mal. Either it spells "spirit-return," or 
telephatic reading of the sitter's mind by 
the medium in trance. 

I think that by this time the reader has 
enough documentary material to gain an 
adequate impression of the case. Addi- 
tional citations of sittings would intro- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 217 

duce no new factors of solution. The en- 
tire lot of reports, read verbatim, would, 
it is true, give a greater relative impres- 
sion of hesitation, repetition, and bog- 
gling generally; and the "rigorously 
scientific" mind would of course rejoice 
to find its own explanatory category, 
"Bosh," greatly confirmed thereby. But 
the more serious critic of the records will 
hold his judgment in suspense; or, if he 
inclines to the spiritistic solution, it will 
be because an acquaintance with the phe- 
nomenon on a much larger scale has 
altered the balance of presumptions in his 
mind, and because spirit-return has come 
to seem no unpermissible thing to his 
sense of the natural dramatic probabili- 
ties. 

Before indulging in some final reflec- 
tions of my own on Nature's possibilities, 
I will cite a few additional evidential 



218 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

points. I will print them in no order, 
numbering them as they occur. 

(i) First of all, several instances of 
knowledge that was veridical and seemed 
unquestionably supernormal. These 
were confidential remarks, some of which 
naturally won't bear quotation. One of 
them, plausible after the fact, could 
hardly have been thought of by any one 
before it. Another would, I think, 
hardly have been constructed by Mrs. 
Piper. A third was to the effect that R. 
H. thought now differently about a cer- 
tain lady — she was less "selfish" than lie 
had called her in a certain private con- 
versation of which he reminded the sit- 
ter. 

(2) Again, there was intense solici- 
tude shown about keeping the records of 
a certain former sitter from publicity. 
It sounded very natural and Hodgsonian, 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 219 

but the trance-Mrs. Piper might also have 
deemed it necessary. 

(3) The following incident belongs to 
my wife's and Miss Putnam's sitting of 
June 12th, 1906: — Mrs. J. said: "Do 
you remember what happened in our li- 
brary one night when you were arguing 
with Margie [Mrs. J.'s sister]?"— "I had 
hardly said 'remember'," she notes, "in 
asking this question, when the medium's 
arm was stretched out and the fist shaken 
threateningly," then these words came: 

R. H. Yes, I did this in her face. I 
couldn't help it. She was so im- 
possible to move. It was wrong 
of me, but I couldn't help it. 

[I myself well remember this fist- 
shaking incident, and how we others 
laughed over it after Hodgson had taken 
his leave. What had made him so angry 
was my sister-in-law's defence of some 



220 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

slate-writing she had seen in California. 
-W.J.] 

(4) At a written sitting at which I was 
present (July 29th, 1907) the following 
came: 

You seem to think I have lost my 
equilibrium. Nothing of the 
sort. 
W. J. You've lost your handwriting, gone 
from bad to worse. 

I never had any to lose. 
Mrs. M. It was a perfectly beautiful hand- 
writing [ironical]. 

Ahem! Ahem! William, do you 
remember my writing you a long 
letter once when you were ill? 
You had to get Margaret [my 
daughter — W. J.] to help you 
read it and you wrote me it 
was detestable writing and you 
hoped I would try and write 
plainer to a friend who was ill, 
next time. How I laughed over 
that, but I was really sorry to 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 221 

make you wade through it. Ask 
Margaret if she remembers it. 
[Perfectly — it was in London. — 
M. M. J.] 

(5) Another item which seems to 
mean either telepathy or survival of R. 
H., came out at a sitting of Miss Pope's 
on Feb. 7th, 1906. 

I am not going to make a botch of 
anything if I can help it. Not 
I. Do you remember my telling 
you what I would do if I got 
over here first. 
Miss P. You said several things about it. 

I said if I couldn't do better than 
some of them I was mistaken. 
I said some of them were awful. 
Remember? And if I based my 
opinion on what they tried to 
give I should expect to be said to 
be in the trick. Remember? 
Miss P. Of course I remember. 

Do you remember a story I told 
you about my old friend Sidg- 



222 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

wick? Don't you remember 
how I imitated him ? 
Miss P. Yes, what word did you say about 
Sidgwick? [I had not decipher- 
ed the word "imitated."— T. P.] 
If I believed in it they would say I 

was in the trick. 
[Still not understanding, T. P. 
said:] 
Miss P. What about Sidgwick? 

I imitated him. 
Miss P. What did you do ? 

I said s-s-s-should-be i-n th-e t-r-i-c-k. 
Miss P. I remember perfectly, that's fine. 

No one living could know this but 

yourself and Mary Bergman. 
[It was most interesting to see the 
hand write these words to imitate 
stuttering, and then for the first 
time it flashed over me what he 
had some time ago told Mary 
and me about Sidgwick, imitat- 
ing at the same time Sidgwick's 
stammer: "H-Hodgson, if you 
b-b-believe in it, you'll b-be said 
to be in the t-trick." I cannot 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 223 

quote the exact words, but this is 
very nearly right. 
Sidgwick referred to Hodgson's 
belief that he was actually com- 
municating, through Mrs. Piper, 
with spirits. He meant that 
people not only would not be- 
lieve what Hodgson gave as evi- 
dence, but would think he was in 
collusion with Mrs. Piper. — 
T, P.] 

(6) At a sitting of Miss Pope's and 
mine, Oct. 24th, 1906, R. H. said of Miss 
P. — "She goes on and puts on bays and 
piazzas, changes her piazzas, her house, 
makes it all over again." As this was 
literally true, and as no one in Boston 
could well have known about it, it seemed 
like mind-reading. [R. H.'s saying is 
possibly explained, however, by a previ- 
ous sitting (April 16th) of Miss Pope's, 
in which another of Mrs. Piper's controls 



224< Beyond the Borderline of Life 

had already of his own accord made the 
same veridical remark, so that the fact 
had got, however inexplicably, into the 
trance-consciousness, and could be used 
by the controls indiscriminately.] 

(7) On Jan. 30, 1906, Mrs. M. had a 
sitting. Mrs. M. said: 

Do you remember our last talk, at 
N., and how, in coming home we 
talked about the work? 

(R. H.) Yes, yes. 

Mrs. M. And I said if we had a hundred 
thousand dollars — 
Buying Billy ! ! 

Mrs. M. Yes, Dick, that was it-— "buying 
Billy." 
Buying only Billy? 

Mrs. M. Oh no — I wanted Schiller too. 
How well you remember ! 

Mrs. M., before R. H.'s death, had had 
dreams of extending the American 
Branch's operations by getting an endow- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 225 

merit, and possibly inducing Prof. New- 
bold (Billy) and Dr. Schiller to co-op- 
erate in work. She naturally regards 
this veridical recall, by the control, of a 
private conversation she had had with 
Hodgson as very evidential of his sur- 
vival. 

(8) To the same sitter, on a later occa- 
sion (March 5th, 1906), the control 
showed veridical knowledge of R. H.'s 
pipes, of which two had been presents 
from herself. She asks him at this sit- 
ting about the disposal of some of his 
effects. He mentions books and photo- 
graphs in a general way, then says: 

I want Tom [his brother] to have 

my pipes, all except any that my 

friends wish. 
Mrs. M. Do you remember any special ones? 
Yes, I — the one you — [The 

hand points to me, etc. — Mrs. 

M.] 



226 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Mrs. M. Which? 

Meerschaum. [I gave R. H. a 
meerschaum pipe some years 
ago. — M.] 
Mrs. M. You do remember! Give it to any 
one you would best like to. 
. . . I want Billy James to 
have it. Will you give it to 
him? Do you remember, etc.? 
Mrs. M. Do you remember any other spe- 
cial pipe? 
You mean with a long stem ? Cer- 
tainly. What about it? 
Mrs. M. Can you recall anything special 
about it? 
What? You mean the one you 
gave me long ago, some time 
ago, not the recent one ? 
Mrs. M. The last one I gave you. 

Last season, last season, yes. 
Mrs. M. A year or two ago, I think it was. 
I recall it well. You gave me 
what I call a briar pipe. [A 
number of years ago I gave R. 
H. a briar-root pipe, with rather 
a long stem, bound round the 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 227 

bowl with silver, but this was 
not the one of which I was 
thinking. — M.] 
Mrs. M. The one I mean was an odd-look- 
ing pipe. 

I know it well, a big large bowl. 
Mrs. M. Wasn't that the meerschaum? 

Yes, Billy is to have it. The face 
one I want Tom to have. I 
want my brother Tom to have 
— face on it. The whole thing 
was a face. I mean the pipe 
bowl. 

[I had seen such a pipe, the whole 
thing a face, at the Charles 
Street rooms a short time be- 
fore. I never remember seeing 
Mr. Hodgson use it. The pipe 
of which I was thinking was a 
carved Swiss pipe which he evi- 
dently does not remember. — 
M.] 

(9) Among my own friends in the 
Harvard faculty who had "passed over" 
the most intimate was F. J. Child. 



228 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

Hodgson during life had never met Pro- 
fessor Child. It looks to me like a su- 
pernormal reading of my own mental 
states (for I had often said that the best 
argument I knew for an immortal life was 
the existence of a man who deserved one 
as well as Child did) that a message to 
me about him should have been spon- 
taneously produced by the R. H. control. 
I had assuredly never mentioned C. to 
Mrs. Piper, had never before had a mes- 
sage from his spirit, and if I had ex- 
pressed my feelings about him to the 
living R. H., that would make the mat- 
ter only more evidential. 

The message through R. H. came to 
Miss Robbins, June 6th, 1906. 

There is a man named Child 
passed out suddenly, wants to 
send his love to William and his 
wife in the body. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 229 

MissR. Child's wife? 

Yes, in the body. He says . . . 
I hope L. will understand what 
I mean. I [i.e. R. H.] don't 
know who L. is. [L. is the 
initial of the Christian name of 
Professor Child's widow. — W. 

jo 

(10) Miss Putnam had been consulted 
about the disposition of certain matters 
left undone by Hodgson at the date of his 
death. At her sitting, much later, these 
words came out. I copy the record as it 
stands : 

R. H. Did you get my Christmas present? 
[A calendar addressed by him 
to me before his death. — A. C. 
P.] I heard you in the body 
say you didn't want them sent. 
[Mr. Hodgson had left some 
Christmas cards addressed, but 
unenclosed. I had expressed 
unwillingness to mail them un- 
enveloped. — A. C. P.] 



230 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

(ii) Mrs. M., on March 30th, placed 
a volume in manuscript in the medium's 
hands. R. H. immediately wrote: 

Well, well. Isn't that the book I 
lent you? 
Mrs. M. Yes. You loaned it to me at 
C . 

I remember, but you have it still ! 
Mrs. M. I returned it to you. 

Yes, but isn't it the one I loaned 
you? And the poems I used to 
love so well, I recall. [The 
book contained poems copied or 
composed by Hodgson, and after 
having been returned to him ere 
he died, had been taken from 
among his effects and brought to 
the sitting by Mrs. M.] 

These eleven incidents sound more like 
deliberate truth-telling, whoever the 
truth-teller be, than like lucky flukes. 
On the whole they make on me the im- 
pression of being supernormal. I con- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 231 

fess that I should at this moment much 
like to know (although I have no means 
of knowing) just how all the documents I 
am exhibiting in this report will strike 
readers who are either novices in the 
field, or who consider the subject in gen- 
eral to be pure "rot" or "bosh." It seems 
to me not impossible that a bosh-philoso- 
pher here or there may get a dramatic im- 
pression of there being something genuine 
behind it all. Most of those who remain 
faithful to the "bosh"-interpretation 
would, however, find plenty of comfort 
if they had the entire mass of records 
given them to read. Not that I have left 
things out (I certainly have tried not to!) 
that would, if printed, discredit the de- 
tail of what I cite, but I have left out, by 
not citing the whole mass of records, so 
much mere mannerism, so much repeti- 
tion, hesitation, irrelevance, unintelligi- 



232 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

bility, so much obvious groping and fish- 
ing and plausible covering up of false 
tracks, so much false pretension to power, 
and real obedience to suggestion, that the 
stream of veridicality that runs through- 
out the whole gets lost as it were in a 
marsh of feebleness, and the total dra- 
matic effect on the mind may be little 
more than the word "humbug." The 
really significant items disappear in the 
total bulk. "Passwords," for example, 
and sealed messages are given in abun- 
dance, but can't be found. (I omit these 
here, as some of them may prove veridi- 
cal later.) Preposterous Latin sentences 
are written, e.g. "Nebus merica este 
fecrum" — or what reads like that (April 
4th, 1906). Poetry gushes out, but how 
can one be sure that Mrs. Piper never 
knew it? The weak talk of the Impera- 
tor-band about time is reproduced, 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 233 

as where R. H. pretends that he no 
longer knows what "seven minutes" 
mean (May 14th, 1906). Names asked 
for can't be given, etc., etc. 1 All this 
mass of diluting material, which can't 
be reproduced in abridgment, has its 
inevitable dramatic effect; and if one 
tends to hate the whole phenomena any- 
how (as I confess that I myself sometimes 
do) one's judicial verdict inclines accord- 
ingly. 

Nevertheless, I have to confess also that 
the more familiar I have become with the 
records, the less relative significance for 
my mind has all this diluting material 

1 For instance, on July 2nd, the sitter asks R. H. to 
name some of his cronies at the Tavern Club. Hodg- 
son gives six names, only five of which belonged to 
the Tavern Club, and those five were known to the 
controls already. None of them, I believe, were those 
asked for, namely, " names of the men he used to play 
pool with or go swimming with at Nantasket." Yet, as 
the sitter (Mr. Dorr) writes, "He failed to realize his 
failure." 



234 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

tended to assume. The active cause of 
the communications is on any hypothesis 
a will of some kind, be it the will of R. 
H.'s spirit, of lower supernatural intel- 
ligences, or of Mrs. Piper's subliminal; 
and although some of the rubbish may be 
deliberately willed (certain hesitations, 
misspellings, etc., in the hope that the sit- 
ter may give a clue, or certain repetitions, 
in order to gain time) yet the major part 
of it is suggestive of something quite dif- 
ferent — as if a will were there, but a will 
to say something which the machinery 
fails to bring through. Dramatically, 
most of this "bosh" is more suggestive to 
me of dreaminess and mind-wandering 
than it is of humbug. Why should a 
"will to deceive" prefer to give incorrect 
names so often, if it can give the true ones 
to which the incorrect ones so frequently 
approximate as to suggest that they are 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 235 

meant? True names impress the sitter 
vastly more. Why should it so multiply 
false "passwords" ("Zeivorn," for ex- 
ample, above p. 86) and stick to them? 
It looks to me more like aiming at some- 
thing definite, and failing of the goal. 
Sometimes the control gives a message to 
a distant person quite suddenly, as if for 
some reason a resistance momentarily 
gave way and let pass a definite desire to 
give such a message. Thus on October 
17th, "Give my love to Carl Putnam," a 
name which neither Mrs. Piper nor the 
sitter knew, and which popped in quite 
irrelevantly to what preceded or fol- 
lowed. A definite will is also suggested 
when R. H. sends a message to James 
Putnam about his "watch stopping." He 
sends it through several sitters and sticks 
to it in the face of final denial, as if the 
phrase covered, however erroneously, 



236 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

some distinct "intention to recall/' which 
ought not to be renounced. 

That a "will to personate" is a factor 
in the Piper-phenomenon, I fully believe, 
and I believe with unshakable firmness 
that this will is able to draw on super- 
normal sources of information. It can 
"tap," possibly the sitter's memories, pos- 
sibly those of distant human beings, possi- 
bly some cosmic reservoir in which the 
memories of earth are stored, whether in 
the shape of "spirits" or not. If this 
were the only will concerned in the per- 
formance, the phenomenon would be 
humbug pure and simple, and the minds 
tapped telephatically in it would play an 
entirely passive role — that is, the tele- 
pathic data would be fished out by the 
personating will, not forced upon it by 
desires to communicate, acting externally 
to itself. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 237 

But it is possible to complicate the 
hypothesis. Extraneous "wills to com- 
municate" may contribute to the results 
as well as a "will to personate," and the 
two kinds of will may be distinct in 
entity, though capable of helping each 
other out. The will to communicate, in 
our present instance, would be, on the 
prima facie view of it, the will of 
Hodgson's surviving spirit; and a nat- 
ural way of representing the process 
would be to suppose the spirit to 
have found that by pressing, so to speak, 
against "the light," it can make fragmen- 
tary gleams and flashes of what it wishes 
to say mix with the rubbish of the trance- 
talk on this side. The two wills might 
thus strike up a sort of partnership and 
reinforce each other. It might even be 
that the "will to personate" would be 
comparatively inert unless it were aroused 



238 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

to activity by the other will. We might 
imagine the relation to be analogous to 
that of two physical bodies, from neither 
of which, when alone, mechanical, ther- 
mal, or electrical activity can proceed, 
but if the other body be present, and show 
a difference of "potential," action starts 
up and goes on apace. 

Conceptions such as these seem to con- 
nect in schematic form the various ele- 
ments in the case. Its essential factors 
are done justice to ; and, by changing the 
relative amounts in which the rubbish- 
making and the truth-telling wills con- 
tribute to the resultant, we can draw up a 
table in which every type of manifesta- 
tion, from silly planchet-writing up to 
Rector's best utterances, finds its proper 
place. Personally, I must say that, al- 
though I have to confess that no crucial 
proof of the presence of the "will to com- 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 239 

municate" seems to me yielded by the 
Hodgson-control taken alone, and in the 
sittings to which I have had access, yet 
the total effect in the way of dramatic 
probability of the whole mass of similar 
phenomena on my mind, is to make me 
believe that a "will to communicate" is 
in some shape there. I cannot demon- 
strate it, but practically I am inclined to 
"go in" for it, to bet on it and take the 
risks." 



CHAPTER X 

SUMMING UP 

THESE are a few of the phenomena 
that have caused science to revolu- 
tionize its ideas and conceptions of the 
world about us. It is the belief of many 
scientists that they are the work of human 
intelligences in spirit form. Lombroso 
believed that these intelligences live in a 
radiant state invisible and impalpable to 
our senses. Morselli, Foa, and Bottazzi 
have not arrived at that conclusion, al- 
though they fully admit the presence of 
forces unexplainable by any known laws. 
Whatever their difference of interpre- 
tation most all agree in the essential fact 
that there is a realm peopled by intelli- 

240 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 241 

gences, of which we are beginning to get 
the first real glimpses. In view of this 
accord, Lodge seems to be justified when 
he says in his recent work, "Life and 
Matter," of Haeckel, that "He is, as it 
were, a surviving voice from the middle 
of the nineteenth century; he represents 
in clear and eloquent fashion, opinions 
which then were prevalent among many 
leaders of thought, opinions which they 
themselves, and their successors still 
more, lived to outgrow; so that by this 
time Professor HaeckeFs voice is as the 
voice of one crying in the wilderness — 
and not as the pioneer of an advancing 
army, but as the despairing shout of a 
standard bearer, still bold and unflinch- 
ing, but abandoned by his comrades as 
they march to new orders in a fresh and 
more idealistic direction." 

The work that is being done through 



242 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

the investigation of psychic phenomena 
in this country by the American Society 
for Psychical Research, of which Dr. 
James H. Hyslop, formerly of Columbia 
University, is now the active head, is de- 
serving of equal support to that accorded 
to the various societies and organizations 
existing for the same purpose as the 
American organization throughout Eu- 
rope. During the time of the existence 
of the American Branch of the British 
Society of Psychical Research, of which 
Prof. Hodgson was the American secre- 
tary, Dr. Hyslop began his investiga- 
tions and is to-day, in connection with 
Prof. William James, formerly of Har- 
vard, one of the very few American men 
of science who have given the subject the 
same amount of consideration and care- 
ful study that practically all of the men 
of science of Europe are giving. 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 243 

As to the hypotheses scientists hold of 
how intelligences can exist all about us, 
and yet not be visible to us, and of the 
ultimate meaning of this revelation — 
these constitute a realm of thought so 
vast and of so many different and novel 
aspects, that they cannot be dealt with 
here. They involve the whole range of 
new conceptions scientists are forming of 
cosmic laws, and of their entirely 
changed ideas regarding time, space, 
matter, and energy. 

But one thing is clear, the mass of 
learned scientists are united in asserting 
that our souls or spirits do survive. Fur- 
thermore, there is now the very closest 
connection between religion in its real 
sense, that is stripped of its formulas and 
dogmas, and these truths disclosed of 
scientific investigation. 



ADDENDUM 

THE journal of the Society for Psychi- 
cal Research for April, 1910, comes to 
hand from London just as this book is to be 
put on the press. It contains a letter from 
Mr. G. B. Dorr describing the events which 
took place on the night of the so-called ex- 
pose of Paladino. There is also an unsigned 
statement by the man who grabbed Paia- 
dino's foot and another by Professor Miin- 
sterberg. Mr. Dorr in describing the foot- 
grabbing says: "Suddenly my friend saw a 
foot, no boot upon it, above him in the dim 
light, and took hold of it. " In sending the 
original description by his friend, Mr. Dorr 
calls attention to his own error in stat- 
ing that the foot was seen; the foot 
244 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 245 

was not seen but was grasped on the in- 
dication of sound alone, as the dim light pre- 
cluded sight. The unsigned report by the 
sitter, who wishes to avoid notoriety, does not 
state whether a boot was on the foot or not. 
It says only, " My fingers closed firmly on 
a human foot in rapid motion which was 
stopped and arrested by my hand. My 
fingers were over the instep and my hand 
closed firmly upon it." Professor Miinster- 
berg writes: "The gentleman who caught 
Madame Paladino's foot in the cabinet told 
me a few minutes afterward — that the foot 
was without a shoe. " Mr. Carrington claims 
that the foot was enclosed in a high-laced 
boot. Paladino was searched that night quite 
thoroughly by two ladies who were present 
by Mr. Dorr's arrangement, but they did 
not take off her boots which did not occur to 
them as necessary. 

Mr. Dorr sums up as follows: "In my 



246 Beyond the Borderline op Life 

three sittings there was nothing that took 
place in connection with the cabinet that could 
not easily be explained by a free foot or hand, 
used skilfully; and that she does use both, 
and skilfully, there now can be no doubt. 
The levitation of the larger table in full light 
I am rather inclined to believe in as genuine, 
as I have already said, partly because the con- 
trol of the eye as well as touch seems, in this 
case to be so good; and if this be genuine, per- 
haps other things are genuine too. But I 
feel quite sure that none of those we saw were 
so, apart from the levitations of the table. " 

A committee composed of Dickinson L. 
Miller of Columbia University and six other 
professors has just published a report of its 
findings in regard to Paladino which says: 
"Many indications were obtained that 
trickery was being practised on the sitters. 
So far as these sittings afford data for judg- 
ment the conclusion of the undersigned is 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 247 

unfavorable to the view that any super- 
natural power in this case exists" * * * * * 
" During a fourth sitting, at which the under- 
signed were present, something like this 
control" (i. e. such control as makes trickery 
absolutely impossible) "was exercised and 
while this was the case none of the so-called 
evidential phenomena took place." The 
report is signed by 

C. L. Dana 

Professor of Nervous Diseases, Columbia 
University 
W. Hallock 

Professor of Physics, Columbia 

D. S. Miller 

Professor of Philosophy, Columbia 
F. Peterson 

Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia 
W. B. Pitkin 

Lecturer on Philosophy, Columbia 
A. Trowbridge 

Professor of Physics, Princeton University 



248 Beyond the Borderline of Life 

E. B. Wilson 

Professor of Biology, Columbia 
R. W. Wood 

Professor of Physics, Johns Hopkins 
University 

A long article by Professor Miller states 
that traps were laid for the medium and 
observers were placed, one in a bureau with 
a glass in the front of a drawer, one on top 
of the cabinet from where he could look 
through a peep-hole into the cabinet and 
another under the sitters' chairs from which 
the rounds had been removed. The claim is 
that Paladino was seen to free her hand and 
one foot and to substitute for the presence 
of both her right and left feet and hands 
that of one, leaving the other hand or foot 
free for action. 

They claim that she was able thus to raise 
the table by putting one foot under the table 
leg. The reader of Professor Bottazzi's 



Beyond the Borderline of Life 249 

account will not find that this explains the 
Paladino phenomena. Neither does it ex- 
plain the table levitation when Mr. Dorr 
and Professor Miinsterberg were present nor 
the many photographs which have been 
taken showing the table clear from the floor. 
That Paladino commits fraud is unde- 
niable. That all the phenomena happen- 
ing at her seances are produced by means 
of fraud is possible; but that Professor 
Miller's report proves this to be so will not 
be accepted by those who have read the 
reports of other investigators. If the char- 
acter of Professor Miller and his associates 
were not above reproach it might be asked 
how it was possible for the hidden observers 
to detect movements from a distance which 
those nearby could not see. The room is 
usually dark and at the time of the foot- 
grabbing incident the foot could not be seen. 



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The Man Forbid and Other Essays. By John Davidson. A 
notable volume of essays by the poet who disappeared last year 
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Views and Reviews. By Henry James. A series of literary es- 
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The Religion of the Future. By Charles W. Eliot, President 
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Beyond the Borderline of Life. By Gustavus Myers. A com- 
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The Immortality of the Soul. By Sir Oliver Lodge. While its 
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How I Know That the Dead Return. By William T. Stead. 
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